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The Great American Eclipse

What it felt like: A hole in the sky to see through. Staring at the too-bright page craving ready revelation, something like, Oh my God, I am or Oh my God, I love or Oh my God, I will. Reaching out both hands and each returning full of what’s there waiting, American idiom. In the right — chrome-edged, neon-lit, long overhead shots along winding roads, coffee from a dinerware mug — the road trip. In the left — dewy, quiet moments in the bathroom, unexpected vomit, yelling at strangers in the street, sweaty and triumphant — the pregnancy.

Looking for a long time at each hand individually before clasping them both together, needing to hold and be held.

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What it was: You always said that before you turned thirty, you’d shave your head and live in California. You did the former on your birthday, wearing a flowing dress in a field like a damn Jodorowsky movie. The latter arrived in the form of a fellowship, a miraculous year spent writing in Berkeley. And you and Ken wanted to open the relationship anyway, grow stronger by moving farther apart. Everyone told you long-distance and open never works, but everyone didn’t know what they were talking about. You lived joyfully in extremes.

And it would be romantic. Ken would drive with you as far as Texas, say a carefully curated goodbye in Austin, and then you’d buy some cowboy boots and pick up Joan from her cousin’s house. You’d see Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, The Arches, hit the Bay to drop off some stuff, then head north to Oregon in time to watch the moon blot out the sun for the first time in a century. It was the last summer of your twenties. You would live it accordingly.

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Just wait till you get old, your mom said once. You won’t remember anything. You’ll wish you took more pictures.

She’s right. Already, you don’t remember much. A sign in the hills saying Welcome to Colorado. Pine trees, red earth. The beautiful lap of flat plain against mountain. Dropping Joan off at a bar in Denver and crying to Enya with the hazard lights flashing.

If you could, you’d develop each frame from cell memory. You’d do it soon, do it now, since the human body renews itself completely every seven years at the cellular level. You read that once in a science-adjacent magazine.

“Whatever else, that baby would have great skin,” Joan quips on the drive to Denver. “You both have such great skin.”

The photos you do take are usually backlit, so everyone appears in silhouette. This is actually an effect you like; the sunlight catches people’s unseen edges. There’s one of Ken that you took in Austin the day you dropped him off at the airport. You can’t see his face but you know it’s smiling, and it’s the shadow of his body that you love, the gap between gesture and resolution. You love a picture that hints at a story, a question that resists answer.

For example: Watching the Colorado mountains unfurl outside the passenger-side window of the car, you tell Joan about your swollen breasts, the feeling of heaviness somewhere behind your ribs. “It sounds like being pregnant feels a lot like getting your period.” She laughs, you laugh together.

What it is: You widen your eyes and girly your voice in a goofy impression of your estrogen talking. Ken finds this hilarious and joins in: “Let’s just do it, right? Let’s just live by the beach! And like have a baby!”

What it feels like: You do not believe in metonymy. You believe only in a part for itself, all parts together a partial snapshot, lit from behind by shifting sun.

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It’s 105 in College Station, TX when you pull up. Joan’s been living here for a month to take care of her godchildren, her cousin’s kids. His wife is sick and he’s working full time at the college, so when he called two months ago, Joan got on a plane. In her family, godparent means something real, though you’re not sure what exactly.

Sitting at the counter in the cousin’s bitterly air-conditioned kitchen, you’re amazed by how patient Joanie is with the kids. The last time you saw her she was wearing a feather-trimmed coat and stumbling drunk on her heels up the street to the diner screaming, “They better fucking have banana cream pie!” Now here she is, serving Cheetos to children, wiping the bright orange dust from the corners of their small mouths.

She hasn’t changed that much, not really. When you first called, she’d exhaled in that same whistling way you’d loved in college and shouted, “Fuck yes I want to see the moon kill the sun!” People don’t change unless they’re hit by a brick, as your grandmother used to say. You think of Ken smiling at you in that way he does, with his mouth closed around his teeth. “But you’re a different person every three months,” he’d say. “I’m adaptable,” you’d throw right back.

The godchildren wave good-bye to Joanie from their tired front lawn, crying in the blaring Texas sun. Joan’s crying a little too. “They’re good kids,” she says as she turns on the radio. “Insane, but all kids are insane.”

You drive northwest, through towns you’ve only heard of in Nanci Griffith songs. You tell Joan how you left Ken back in Austin; how you drove around the airport three times before finally bringing yourself to park. She does that thing you love about her where she doesn’t ask you deep questions, just stuff like what color shirt Ken was wearing and what you had for breakfast together. It helps you remember, and remembering helps you relax into knowing that it already happened, that it’s over now. You cry a little then.

By 9 p.m. you’ve hit Abilene and decide to spend the night one town over, at the Ranch House Motel in Sweetwater. The lobby is full of trophies: pigeons and turkeys and deer; bowling awards; marksmanship; t-ball. It smells like cigarettes and an early episode of Charmed plays on the TV shoddily rigged above the staircase. Joan catches your eye as she pays the deposit, and you both wave goodnight to the taxidermied turkey before heading across the parking lot to your room.

You fall asleep that night on a pillow soaked in lavender oil — a fruitless effort to blot out some smell Joan can’t discern but says she believes you about anyway. You fall asleep watching the first twenty minutes of Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum in River of No Return, watching Marilyn croon to a room full of gold prospectors, shimmying lazily across the Western set, her mouth a languid bow, her shoulders bare and sad. You mourn the career she should have had, and once you’re asleep you dream that Marilyn’s playing Hedda Gabler in a room full of mirrors and doing a wonderful job.

What it feels like: That thing about dreaming while pregnant, what is that thing, it isn’t true.

What it is: Pregnancy must have enhanced your sense of smell.

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You wake at 7 a.m. and peer through the blinds into the Ranch House Motel parking lot, already almost empty of trucks and trailers. You and Joan cross the asphalt for the complimentary breakfast and she points to a shrub cut in some amorphous animal shape. “Fun!” she says, to ease the silence. Inside you enjoy the eggs and biscuits and gravy more than you thought you would, until a guy in the nightmare red-and-white baseball hat enters, leading his sagging wife and flashing the pistol he open-carries on his hip. You and Joan choke slightly, eat faster. “Fuck Trump,” you say on your way out, saluting brightly with one hand. “Fuck Trump,” she agrees, saluting back. You drive the rest of the morning in relative silence.

By lunch you’ve reached Texico, New Mexico — high, clean, alien — where the public radio is all Muzak renditions of Beatles standards and Ennio Morricone. Outside the sun pierces cloud-scudded plateaus in godlike rays. Nothing feels real and more feels possible, and all the license plates read “Land of Enchantment.”

From the passenger seat, Joan looks up the industries of the region on her phone, reading aloud ironically that the largest is retail as you gaze out into beautiful empty space. When you stop for gas, Joan urges you inside to hydrate. “And get a fucking pregnancy test, will you? You keep putting it off.” The gas station is having a special: three dollars for one test, five dollars for two. The kid behind the register snorts a little through a sea of pimples as he rings you up. “Good luck,” he says as you allow the door to close behind you.

You keep coming across the word “ouroboros,” so while Joanie drives you look it up and find an image of a serpent eating its own tail and a quote from Plato’s Timaeus: “The universe was created without legs and without feet.”

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Santa Fe, “Sacred Faith,” a clay-red city. The house you’re staying in belongs to Joan’s friend, some po-mo cowboy with two copies of Bergman’s collected screenplays who’s off visiting Iceland for the summer. There are soft textiles and cool tile flooring, a drowsy hammock in the front yard. Joan is heading out to meet a friend for a drink, but you stay home to watch TV. “You better have taken the damn test by the time I get back,” she laughs, and you laugh and promise. Instead, you spend the evening paying close, clean attention to three potted succulents on the bedroom’s darkening windowsill. You marvel at their self-sufficiency. You wish you could photosynthesize.

When Joan gets home, she hands you a beer from the fridge and then retracts it. “Not till you pee on the stick. Go, go right now, you’re making me nervous.”

You’ve done this before, countless times — wages of an irregular period. Still, you hate to wait sitting on the toilet like a cliché. Instead you stand and stare into the mirror at the reflection of a framed still from Paris, Texas. There’s mirrors on either side of you, so standing there at the sink you do not wait alone. A thousand identical tests sit beside you on a thousand identical bathroom counters reflecting each other back and back, and each reflection isn’t just you, it’s also some girl you’ve seen on TV — some pale face badly lit by bathroom fluorescents knee-deep in a moment of public discovery. As if any moment could be called a turning point, a point at all and not an ouroboros.

What it is: Joan creates your online Planned Parenthood account while you lie curled into her on the bed, the untasted beer sweating on the po-mo cowboy’s nightstand. You watch as she sets the password to FUCK.

What it feels like: In the photo you take of those three succulents on the cowboy’s window ledge, they’re silhouetted in murky, jagged lines and seem much smaller than you remember.

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Joanie drives to Denver. You look out the window and think of names: Ruby — Stephen — Burden — Hope. You have to talk theory as much as praxis; consider how the dying world might hold another human life; consider if you ever wanted this; consider if you want it now. You were trained by an elite educational system to reckon with the countless valences of any given issue. The drive takes six hours.

Whoever loved their life enough to know they wanted to make another? On the phone and then in person, Ken quotes Lee Edelman’s No Future and then makes fun of himself. You quote Joni Mitchell — and he’s so busy/being free — and then make fun of yourself. You can’t seem to choose between “womb” and “uterus” which word you hate more.

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An overhead shot of your dusty Subaru winding its way down the Pacific Coast Highway. You trail your hand in the breeze out the window, pull off at scenic overlooks to peer knowingly into the fog, as if you can see anything at all. When you reach your destination, you’ll climb the weathered front steps and you won’t be ready but also, maybe for the first time, you will be. You’ll vomit unexpectedly in the yarrow growing wild by the front door.

In five days, at 5:19 p.m., what they’re calling The Great American Eclipse will tear a dark line across the sky two states North and some longitude points to the west. You schedule your final appointment for the day before. At sunset that night, the rocks off the coast carve jagged outlines against a grey muddle of sea and sky. You stand looking out at the Pacific and press your two hands together, breathing into the space between, praying very well for nothing in particular.

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It’s an hour drive to the Planned Parenthood in San Jose — patron saint of pioneers and travelers. You answer all their questions, sign the papers. You are a body among many, lit from behind.

The room is clean, quiet and dim. Ken sits beside you holding your hand. The nurse connects the IV, tells you what she’s doing before she does it. “You’ll get sleepy soon,” she says. “But we’ve got music. Is there anything you’d like to listen to?” The doctor enters wearing one of those Bay Area fleece vests, her hair tied back in an active ponytail. She greets Ken, introduces her assistants. “The procedure itself is very simple,” she says easily. You’re warm and drifting as the nurse puts on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors and you groove subtly into sleep. Every other state you drove through on the trip does not legally allow for this particular procedure.

You wake up under a blanket in the backseat of your Subaru. Joan is driving. Ken strokes your hair. What it feels like. What it is.

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Totality only lasted about three minutes, but you cried for much longer than that. When you search the Internet for eclipse photos later, you see the sun and its light as you’ve never seen it and never will: all flares and eddies, revealed in corona against the dark. You see your body too — a collection of circumstances, a series of prayers for revelation.

Oh God, I do not want the future as it currently appears. Oh God, I understand the past, its language in curves of shadowed light. Oh God, my job is simple: choose, and then remember.

That night you thought you saw a comet, but Ken looked up from washing lettuce and told you it was a plane. Joan looked up the flight on her phone: 776 coming in from Taiwan, ten minutes behind schedule and chasing a shadow all the way across the sky.

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Jessica Goldschmidt is a writer and choreographer currently living on Lenape land in Brooklyn. She’s a graduate of the CalArts Creative Writing MFA, and her work has appeared in Guernica, Entropy, and various performance spaces around New York which she hopes to enter again soon.

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