The last time I saw a total solar eclipse was all the way back in 2017, on August 21st, sometime in the early afternoon. It was on the drive back from a camp five hours from home.
It had been one of the worst weeks of my life so far. My then-girlfriend stopped talking to me, disgusted with me for no apparent reason. All of my "friends" blamed me for her lashing out. I cried and cried and cried. I was away from home, so I was away from all of my comforts, stuck into an intensive week of choral practice converging with a concert. Fun fact: my therapist at the time was also there. Her kid was in the band camp or the orchestra camp or something. I saw her briefly.
There was no way I could tell everyone how I was feeling. How could I even begin to explain any of it? Even as an adult, looking back, all of it was so stupid and so fake. You think that as you get older, you learn to move on. You don't really move on from it. You move further from it, and sometimes the pain still comes a'stinging, but it's more dull now. It's like being hit with rocks instead of stones.
This was also the summer that my favorite rock band released an original album--their first since 2003 (not counting a studio album in 2005). I was so excited for it. My father, who I'd all but stopped talking to, even sent me the disc in the mail as an early birthday gift. The music was tainted by the pain in my head, my heart, my hands, from all the playing on the swing-set. These things will eat away at your core.
I remember watching the sun slowly disappear behind the moon, like a gigantic cloud passing by, just smaller and darker and more round. We passed a pair of little eclipse glasses through the bus to look at it. With music blaring in my ears, and my mind repeating the mantra of going home so I wouldn't have to focus on the moon-sized hole in my heart, I looked up. And there it was. Like a giant pupil covering an iris. I wish I could have appreciated it more for the incredible scientific event that it was, but I didn't even care. It happened. I was going home. I was ready to change into a different shirt in the car and have to take yearbook photos--yes, that very same day!--when I felt empty.
I was about to turn 15 then, and now I'm 21. I'm older, and maybe a little more mature. But there's a part of me that's scared that when I look up into the sky around 3:00 PM Eastern, I'm going to remember what it was like. Sitting in that uncomfortable bus seat, hearing Locomotive loop in my headphones, and staring up into thousands upon thousands of years of rotating and pivoting suddenly colliding in a way that'll darken the skies minutes later, as the last minuets of light sparkle away. Something you can move away from, but something that sinks in its teeth. And still hurts, even if it doesn't hurt the you who exists right now, it hurts that it happened to the past you. Because he didn't deserve that.
What is light without darkness? What is dark without lightness? They can't exist without each other, and that's why some of us feel like hero stories have gotten out of hand recently. You can never fully banish darkness. There will always be a shadow. But that doesn't mean the darkness is bad. Darkness can be good, too. You have to live with both. I have to live with both sides. All sides of my life now.
On Thursday, June 11th, 2048, there will be an annular solar eclipse (this is where the sun looks like a ring behind the shadow of the moon) whose path of totality will pass over the entire Upper Peninsula and the northernmost Lower Peninsula of Michigan. This will probably be the next time I'll be able to see something like this in my home state. I'll be 45 years old then. Will I still be thinking about all these things? Will I fumble with my shitty plastic eclipse glasses, thinking to myself, where the hell is my boombox, I need to turn on some Styx? Or will it completely pass me by? Will I even remember her name, or will there be somebody else in the picture, another body to capture my time? Will children crawl up my short body and beg to see it happen? Or will a dog lay its head across my lap and sigh, not wanting me to move from my seat on the couch?
I guess only time tells. And what time tells me right now is that I'm sitting in my college dorm room, shirtless and a little too sticky and warm, thinking about how I'm procrastinating looking for a job because I don't know what the hell I want to do just yet. And soon, the moon is going to block out the sun (well, just a little bit) and I'm going to look up at it, thinking, I wonder what Momma's doing right now.