But make no mistake, the girl contains fire to evaporate oceans, light to blind minor gods.
How can that comet burn as it does, pursue the trajectory it does? It confuses you, because the comet disguises itself as a human girl. You will love that comet, but part of that love-a percentage impossible to calibrate-is tied to your inability to understand it. You will sacrifice all you are or ever will be for that comet because it suffuses every inch of your skin with a sweet itch you cannot scratch, and through its grace you discover velocities you never dreamed possible.
It’s burning your hands, eating you up, but there’s no malice in it a comet can’t possibly know or care about you. “Imagine trying to hold the tail of a comet as it blazes across the heavens. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.” Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out-or worse, you steal it from yourself. Even if your mind wants to go there, it has lost the nimbleness needed to make the leap. You stop believing in the things my uncle believed in. You’re no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child: that you’d die in convulsions from inhaling the gas from a shattered lightbulb, that chewing apple pips brought on death by cyanide poisoning, or that a circus dwarf had actually bounced off a trampoline into the mouth of a hungry hippo. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes.
That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I’d ever feel.
“I was scared-with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished.
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