Interesting Facts about Space

by Emily R. Austin

Sometimes you have to joke about things like pickling murdered teenagers. It’s a coping mechanism. It takes the darkness out at the knees.

That must be why they keep inviting me to events. On a subconscious level, they want my bone marrow.

I don’t think I have the capacity to feel impassioned.

I click play on the next episode. I feel all my muscles unclench. Nothing puts me at ease more than hearing someone calmly discuss homicide.

It makes me feel safe, like there’s no reason to panic. Sure, women get their heads chopped off by men who vowed to love them forever, but we can still plan to eat Atlantic salmon on basmati rice next week.

This episode is the first in a series about Ted Bundy. I’m already well acquainted with Ted, but I don’t mind hearing the same story over and over. In fact, I prefer it. I like knowing what happens. I feel more control over it.

They helped him anyways, because of the broken arm schtick, and because women are trained to be polite to men even when men are ugly and make them feel uncomfortable.

I can tell that I wouldn’t be attracted to him, but that is true of every man except for a few very specific celebrities, and some fictional male characters who were written by women.

As I got older, the imagination games morphed into daydreams. I invented interactions between me and my dad, as well as with other people. I did it so often that it’s now hard for me to distinguish between real memories and memories of scenarios I made up. Everything has melded together.

I put perfumes over the true smell of my skin and whittle off all the controllable reasons why someone might dislike me.

I think that if there were no one else alive I wouldn’t clean my house. I would pile garbage everywhere. I would collect wrappers, acorns, and rocks, and hoard them around me like a dirty little ferret. If I existed alone, I doubt I would wash my hair. I would shave my head. I would perch on a hill of my own trash, naked.

It happens often that people I match with on dating apps cancel at the last minute. It comes with the territory. I think part of why I make these plans is to experience it. I think on some level I am less interested in dating than I am in being repeatedly rejected so that I can stew in that comfortable bad feeling. There is something ...

I hate that I am self-absorbed enough to hate myself in detail.

I feel self-loathing so deeply I think if I cracked myself open, I would see the physical manifestation of it calcified in my bones like a geode.

The ladies’ room has a rusty tampon dispenser affixed to the wall. When the machine releases my tampon, I clutch it and retreat to a stall as if I am a racoon coveting a handful of stolen cat kibble.

“What about you? What other things do you like besides murder?” I try to think quickly. Fuck. Do I like things?

She said, “You know, recently I realized that to my parents, I am someone different than to my friends. To my teachers, I am someone different than to my coworkers. Between my friends, ex-boyfriend, and roommates, I am someone totally different. I think if you picked two people from my life and asked them to describe me, they would describe two completely different people.” I thought of the people I went to school with. I thought of my new friends at university, the people I had dated, my mom, and my dad. I said, “I feel that way too.” She said, “To some of them, I’m bad.” I nodded. “Me too.” “Do you know who we really are? Do you know which person is right?” “None of them?” I guessed. “No, they all are,” she said. I ate my pickled turnips and stewed with that thought. “Hey, for me, you will always be a nice person who paid for my food and walked me home.” “Okay, and for me you’ll always be someone nice who listened to me complain.” “Let’s promise to never meet again so we can’t ruin it. Let’s stay nice people to each other to balance out how we’re bad for other people.”

“I have a hard time gauging what’s appropriate first-date conversation. I’ve heard bisexual women often joke that on first dates with men they make awkward small talk, but with women they talk about their childhood trauma.”

I am uncomfortable discussing personal topics with strangers, or anyone really. I also feel like their trauma is so much worse than mine, I feel embarrassed to even discuss mine.

I wish I were capable of being rude enough to leave. I wish I were a different person.

I presented myself with no consideration toward my true personal tastes or interests. I wore the clothing I did, bought the things I did, and behaved how I did purely to protect myself from negative attention.

Sometimes the intensity of your reaction is out of proportion with the injustice that you’re reacting to.”

She laughs again. “Are you okay? You sound a little frantic.” “Oh yeah. I’m totally okay.” I am clutching a butcher knife.

The podcast host mentions that John Wayne Gacy lured one of his victims from a Greyhound bus station, which solidifies my belief that Greyhound bus stations are just fronts for hell mouths.

“One thing I always tell my patients is that everyone can say it could have been worse. Don’t diminish the parts of your childhood that were difficult because they were comparatively better than others.”

“Um, to be honest, I think I don’t remember because I don’t like thinking about it. I used to ruminate when I was younger. I used to plan what I would say to people, and then think about what I had said. I used to enjoy doing that; it felt like playing, sort of. After high school, it felt unpleasant ruminating about past things, so I totally stopped. I didn’t like doing it. I think you have to think back to things to remember them, right? You have to revisit memories to keep them? I don’t let myself think about high school at all. There’s like a block.”

Whenever I see my mom watching her food cook in the oven, I sit next to her and look in. You can’t kill yourself in modern ovens. Well, I’m sure you could. You could kill yourself with anything if you tried hard enough. When we sit there, though, I feel like we are moths drawn to the memory of what an oven can do to sad women.

I spent a lot of time growing up trying to seem normal. Sometimes I worry I neglected doing the internal work most people do while they’re developing; I was too preoccupied camouflaging. I think I might be stunted because of it. I think I missed a step.

I want to linger here in the in-between, half-made, in some permanent adolescence, forever. I don’t ever want to become my full self. There is no reality I can envision where myself now doubled is good. I think that if I were fully formed, I would be awful. I’d be even worse than I am now.

I’m always fighting this impulse to find people who might love me. I make dating profiles and meet up with them to validate myself. It feels like a game. I feel like I’m playing with something dangerous—like an arsonist with matches.

I want to hold people’s beating hearts in my hands.

want to get as close as I can to them; to touch all their things, to put my mouth on them. I want to trick them into loving me. I want to test whether I can be loved; however, I think the way to test whether I am capable of truly loving people back is by ending t...

I hope I leave her alone. If you know you are capable of doing something abhorrent, like Ted Bundy, and you are unable to kill yourself because you have a mother, or a similar responsibility, then you should keep your distance. You should create space.

A woman in Alabama was hit by a meteorite in 1954. It streaked through the sky in a fireball in the early afternoon. It crashed through the roof of her farmhouse, bounced off a large wooden console radio, and woke her up from a nap on the couch. It didn’t kill her, but it ruined her day.

She painted all the walls yellow, because I asked her to, and we went to thrift stores to buy our furniture.

I wish I were born different. I wish I could smile at bald men, or call my mom just to say hi, and not to check if her head’s in the oven.

I lost track of my objective while perusing the forum because so many people have written about being deaf in one ear, and it’s making me tear up. Not because it’s sad, but because it’s strange to discover that I’ve had shared experiences.

I totally get why you behaved that way.” Reading this comment makes me feel strangely upset. I read it over three times. I mouth the words, “I totally get why you behaved that way.” I don’t often feel like anyone gets why I behave the way I do.

I will never understand how my dad could stand in the glow of my mom, as if an inch from a star, and be unmoved by her formidable light. It has been devastating to watch her fade in response to him.

I lie in a soup of myself, wishing I could rocket into space.

I am thinking about how everyone’s behavior is motivated by many secret things. I know there are reasons why people do things that I am not in on. I know I am not the center of the universe. The sun does not revolve around me. There are lots of questions I will never know the answers to. I don’t know if wormholes exist, or why my dad didn’t like me, or why I started a fire. Maybe there are good reasons. Maybe everything I think is wrong.

I often don’t want to know the truth because I’m worried that it will reveal something I won’t be able to handle. I think that I would rather be ignorant, but maybe that’s wrong. When I’m ignorant, I start thinking I’m crazy.

might not word this right,” I say. “Uh. But I have this problem where I worry that I’m a bad person, and that I might hurt people. When I was younger, I was vindictive, and I used people in relationships. I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was a kid and I don’t know if I missed something other people learn, or if I was born with a defect, or if I caught some sort of bug, but I think something is wrong with me. My mom was depressed when I was a kid, and I always sort of attributed it to my dad leaving. I saw with her what people can do to each other, and have always sort of thought it wasn’t worth it. I don’t know if this makes sense, but I’m worried I have a parasite. Like there is something bad in me that is liable to take over. I feel like I am a shell for some weird little bug. I wanted to spare you the risk of exposure to that. Do you get what I mean?” She looks at me for longer than is normal. “Yeah, I get what you mean,” she says. “I really am sorry,” I say. “I forgive you,” she says. “In fact, I’d be open to taking you back, if you grovel a little.” I exhale. “Really?” “Yes.” She smiles. “I love weird little bugs, remember?”

Vin grins. “Yeah, way to go, Enid. You’re a star.”