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Sheets of Galaxies
     after Intergalactic by The Beastie Boys

For a while my family thought I was interested in science, when in fact I only loved space. The aspirational Christmas gift of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time lay dumped in a corner of my bedroom floor, abandoned at the very first equation. My mother sent me to some kind of high achiever’s summer session in astronomy, something she clearly could not afford. The teacher handed out photocopies of a page filled with dots.

“Look closer,” he said.

Each dot was actually a galaxy. These tiny thumbprint whorls filled the paper. He had given us a sheet of galaxies from the deep fields of space. I fell in love with that piece of paper.

My grandfather bought me a DIY telescope kit, but when I tried putting it together I got glue on the mirror, utterly spoiling the view. In science class, I hypothesized about dark energy and failed the math sections of the tests. My extra-credit essay, designed to save my grades for college, explored the concept that there might be extra universes we could not see on the other sides of black holes—our own universe “was only the start of what lightless infinite space might contain.”

“If there are other worlds and other galaxies,” I wrote, “then why not other universes?”

“What If!?!” the teacher wrote in red ink next to a giant C-. And then: “SEE ME after class!”

As it turned out, I had nothing to fear—the teacher only wanted to loan me a paperback novel called In Watermelon Sugar. I had told him early on that I wanted to be an astronaut or an astronomer and this was his way of letting me down, gently.