漫游 (Roaming)

Catherine Xue, United States

The universe revolves slowly on my ceiling. I marvel at this room-sized star set—fracturing at corners, bending down walls—and thank Amazon Prime for delivering me a truncated cosmic wonder with incredible punctuality. Neon green speckles in place of stars roam my room in a slow, clockwise rotation, sweeping over the textures of my life, committing my things to memory. A few green stragglers journey across my mother’s old quilt, soaring over folds and dipping low into ridges where seams join, following the humanistic pattern of movement sewn into the very blanket. A few other speckles scramble over my grandmother’s portrait, xed haphazardly to a corner with blue tack. 

My mother approved of this galaxy projector purchase about a week ago because she thought it’d resolve some of the loneliness haunting my new apartment. Consider it a gift from home, she said as we discussed my furniture arrangement. In that moment, it’d sounded like a threat—the words from home raised like teeth, suggesting that my newfound independence was only an awkward, teenaged attempt at playing house, and that my real home lay elsewhere, with her. But thinking again, it must’ve been my own fear disguring her good intent. By then, adulthood had introduced me to plenty of new horrors—ranging from mold growing in unsuspecting tupperware to st-sized spiders crawling out air vents; but the one that always got me was never outgrowing my dependency on my mother and forever considering “homebound” to be any direction which pointed back to her. 

/// 

I am terrible at living alone. Unlike the sitcoms, movies—hell, even furniture assembly pamphlets—that depict a certain ease to adulthood, I am inelegant with everything I do. My laundry makes mountainous terrain out of my bedroom, covering the beautiful hardwood oors I chose my apartment for, and the latest traced actions on my phone are frantic Google searches for quick-xes and defeated calls to my mother. 

As week-old oranges lay unpeeled on my dining table, I sink into the couch, watch the afternoon sky make dierent colors out of my ceiling. David Bowie’s on the record player, and as his voice trembles through the room, I try to gather a mental record of everything I haven’t done. The resulting list varies from setting up a new bank account to unpacking the last of my possessions to getting tonight’s dinner from the grocery store. I nd the motivation to do none of those things and instead turn on my side, letting my body take root. 

When I lived with my mother, my time was governed. Like the repetitive motifs in her quilt, my life fell into a regimen—hours split and slotted to patterns of academia, laundry, small-talk, repeat. I once lived with rhythm, with movement, and now, without external force pressing me forward, I’ve fallen out of orbit, into stillness. I spend most of my free time on at surfaces—beds, couches, oors, carpets—waiting for something to happen, watching as things move on without me. 

/// 

If not for my mother, I might’ve failed Calculus 2 in freshman year. Even though we phoned from dierent coasts, in dierent time zones, she decrypted integrals for me without fail, scribbling out

explanations and examples of every possible mutation of the antiderivative. I watched her hands work eciently, stopping only when the internet lag made them appear so. 

Over the years, it wasn’t just math that she helped me with; it was every fall out with a friend, every suspicious body anomaly I’d Googled into cancer. I’d leave for hours, or days, or weeks—convinced I could contain things on my own with Vitamin C and delusion—only to eventually return to her number and wait anxiously for her voice at the end of the ziptone. Every time, it felt as if all the progress I’d made, all of the comfort-zone breaching things I’d done would erase, revert to nothing as soon as she asked me what was wrong. 

/// 

After six weeks of living alone, I invite my old college friend Maria over for the rst time. We hike our feet up onto the couch, bend our legs so our chins rest on our knees. I serve us poorly sliced peaches on mismatched plates and we watch her favorite show on my TV. 

Halfway through an episode, Maria decides she’s bored of the male lead and we talk instead. She tells me about her boyfriend I’ve never met and how grad school is going and, in turn, I tell her about the plants I’m trying to raise and my awful commute to work. 

When our talk plateaus, I use one of the only conversation kindlers I know and ask about her family. She blinks a few times, as if she hadn’t expected the question, and then shrugs. “Honestly, I’m not sure. I don’t think we’ve talked in a while.” 

“You guys don’t talk?” I ask, taken aback. 

Maria traces a seam on the couch. “No—I mean we denitely keep in contact and stu but we don’t talk about what’s going on in our lives.” 

“So living with your boyfriend is for-real then?” I ask. “You actually feel independent from your family now?” 

She pauses and then nods. “I think so. I guess I do miss them every so often but for the most part it feels right—Curtis and I.” 

Part of my brain decides this condence she’s getting at is impossible, so I probe again. “But don’t you still feel like a child sometimes? Like it’s impossible to get by alone? I mean, it seems pretty natural that you’ll need help from your parents every so often, right? Don’t you feel lost with your life most of the time?” 

“Not really,” Maria says, frowning. “Julia, are you doing okay?” 

/// 

According to NASA, galaxies were not always independent; over the course of hundreds of millions of years, separate galactic entities that existed intimately enough would collide, forming a singular, expanded unit. This conjunction is referred to as a merger, and mergers are considered fundamental to the evolution of galaxies. 

But interestingly enough, it is this intimacy, this fusion, that is known as one of the greatest acts of cosmic violence. When two galaxies merge, their identities blur: the gravitational force and structure of

either entity is disrupted as they spiral towards one another. In certain cases, larger galaxies will commit acts of cannabalism, wholly consuming the smaller galaxies, essentially erasing them from existence. In the end, it is dependency which destroys. 

/// 

A few weeks after Maria’s visit, a knot appears in my ribcage. I wake up at 2 AM, sweat soaked. There’s a void actively creating itself in my stomach and the air in my room suddenly feels sparse. I decide I need a walk outside so I unpeel myself from my sheets, knock knees on corners I didn’t even know existed in my apartment as I forage for clothes. An Oh crap and a new purple constellation on my left hip earns me a pair of linen shorts I’d stolen from my mother years ago and one of my old tanks; it’s just my luck that it’s a complicated club top I chose—a thousand neon grip-straps now sorted half-assedly around my neck. I bull through my apartment, the void becoming a festering hole in between my ribs, and run down to the street as a muddled green disco ball. 

On my trek, it's as if everything around me is lifting—paint on the walls of buildings stripped from the wood, the city’s radioactive colors removed from billboards and LED’s, the newest car models yanked from the roads, groaning as their metal innards separate. The city feels like it’s tearing itself up—relandscaping, maybe. 

I walk into a bodega to escape the crossre, the white lights in the ceiling like little points needling into my skin. As I hyperventilate past aisles of cough medicine and 24-hour relief pills, the cashier takes notice of my panic and approaches me. 

“Honey, are you okay?” she asks, placing a gentle hand on my arm. Her blue work vest is irritatingly bright to my eyes. 

I mumble something along the lines of can’t breathe and stomach hurts. 

“Do you maybe think you’re having an anxiety attack? Or a panic attack?” she asks through the interference buzzing in my head. 

Tears are spilling out at this point and I crouch to the oor. 

“Honey, do you need help?” the cashier probes, crouching down next to me. 

I shake my head, my vision ashing blue and white. “I don’t know,” I croak. “I don’t know.” After a few minutes of back and forth—her asking me if I need help and me uttering I don’t know in a stubborn loop—she nally gives up and retires to the cashier counter. I squeeze my eyes shut when she leaves and wait for the world between aisles C and D to stop spinning. 

The pit in my stomach only worsens, and I hesitate for a brief moment in between labored breaths before rummaging for my phone in my shorts pockets. 

With shaky hands, I open my most recent contact and reluctantly hit the call button. When my mother answers, I start relearning how to breathe.

Catherine Xue is a freshman studying the intersection between creative writing and marketing at New York University. She listens to sad music on rotation (even if she’s happy) and writes strictly in EB Garamond font. If she’s not crying over her math homework, she’s probably teaching herself how to draw.