‘Galaxy’ comes from the Ancient Greek for milk. People looked at the density of stars and saw birth, maternal sustenance scattered across the sky. A miracle, something over nothing. Fenna says my first word was ‘da’, that Geert liked to say I’d picked up English. But ‘da’, in my third language, means ‘there’ – a gesture, a directive, a hand that’s pointing. I prefer this reading. It’s there. Like the blank message sent from Voyager 1, a bare, empty fact. A world, a thing. It’s there. It can’t be, but it’s there.
