Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I thought that I told you a story about the Local Group of Galaxies getting together for tea, gathering from all over their 10 million light years to put their feet up and complain about their most unruly of stars, how difficult it is to slick down that black hole that sits right at the hairline. Where Andromeda got that particularly fashionable peak of dust, and how to combat solar wind drying. Like a chapter of the Foreign Legion or a knitting group, gossiping scandalously with the Irregular galaxies and feeling unsure exactly how to approach the Dwarf galaxies. Tittering nervously over their cups of emptiness and dark matter.

But thinking back I instead remember deciding to tell myself a story, tired with the effort of re-polishing that which disdain and indifference had tarnished. Tired of propping up smiles and anticipation with the dullest of toothpicks, attempting to keep inside and outside humors from mixing, to keep acids and bases separate and explosions minimal. I felt like Michigan J. Frog, sure that you would sell me to a flea circus the minute I started singing.

In The House of Seven Gables Hawthorne mentions a mirror that keeps each image that has stood in front of it, layered over and over and over and over, your face on top of my face on top of grandma's face on top of the mayor's on top of the vacuum salesman's on top of the religious pilgrim's. It seems like an awful lot of time for one mirror to hold without throwing itself to the ground and giving us all bad luck.

Or maybe it has, and we didn't hear the sound of shattering for all of this glass stuck in our feet.