Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay—as impossible as that can seem sometimes.

Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time. And yet, most of the stars have been there for so long, burning so bright, that every human generation could have looked up and seen them. When you gaze up at the sky and you see Antares, with its reddish hue, in the middle of the constellation Scorpius, you are looking at the same star the Babylonians cataloged as early as 1100 B.C.E. To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

Let the world be as I see it for just tonight. Without too many gray areas and caveats. Where I know I’m mortal but I’m not sure that you’re not a god,”

Of course men were uninteresting to her. They were fundamentally uninteresting. We are interesting.

The world clicked into place for Joan then: why men were so obsessed with women’s bodies, why they made so many mistakes just to get closer to one.

“The whole sky makes sense to me now,” Vanessa said. “Because of you.” And Joan thought, Oh no. Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

Joan knew then that Donna was not an idiot. And the Beatles were not nonsense. And that there had always been a place for her in this world. She had just been walking past it over and over again, never noticing that there was an unmarked door, waiting for her to discover it.