Lady Asteroid (Excerpt)
This selection is the beginning of a full-length work about how both myth and madness have featured in my mental health journey. Raised in an abusive home with no safe person to confide in for most of my childhood and adolescence, I instead mythologized my immediate reality to protect myself from the violent, misogynistic fabrications my father tried to brainwash me with.
As an adult, I came to recognize this as the brain’s incredible capacity to protect and heal itself, but had to examine the distinction between a) fabrications we use to protect ourselves with and b) fabrications we use to hurt others, particularly children who have no line of defence but their own imaginations. In the past two years of therapy, I’ve been dazzled and disturbed to reflect on how I retold frightening, powerless realities to myself as they were happening to survive an environment so stained with hatred it might as well have been the site of the toxic radiation spill.
This work has expanded into a series of narrative flashbacks and examinations of the abuse structures at work, including separate asides throughout the text to advise readers on how to recognize, process, and escape abusive behaviours in their own lives. It begins with the story of an Asteroid and a Comet intersecting for a moment before tackling an otherwise unbearable subject with glittering metaphor, historical comparisons, and a message of hope for anyone who felt as hopeless as I was standing under the stars at fifteen wishing I could go anywhere but back to my father’s house.
Lady Asteroid
or,
Things I Learned from the Vacuum
1
As Nijinsky screamed the counts to his dancers over the deafening roar of a fin-de-siecle riot that I once assumed was a premonition of the violent century to come, sometimes I can barely hear both my past and future selves screaming hoarsely to me, warning or begging me to read the omens. The child wants me to come back and get her; she is trapped in the closets of my first homes, a ghostly imprint that twitches to life only to plead with me not to leave her there alone. She is never younger than the twilight when I first knew my father wanted to kill me. My future self is harder to interpret; she sends me myths I don’t recognize beyond a few subjective symbols. These myths require a living exegesis to understand: I illuminate their text beneath my skin and draw their silhouette upon its surface, as chaperoned Georgian daughters used to be permitted to do for their suitors, tracing his outline upon a paper that they could adore later in private, perhaps by the same candle that had cast first his shadow.
Suspended between these selves, an asteroid swam out of the furthest reaches of my mind on a dark evening that I followed a portentous moon home: a lady-behemoth attended by smoking debris that she had collected during her long internment in the void between solar systems. Time had no meaning for her without the markers of orbits to bisect years into manageable interludes, and her entourage of attendant meteorites boasted pedigree from every system that her unending momentum had carried her through like a majestic tayū. Her emergence from my mind’s darkest, deepest recess alarmed me, for I believed the tragic villain of an old B-movie about the Id following us to forbidden planets: “Man was not meant to gaze into the face of infinity.” But I hadn’t transgressed; the lady asteroid had been released at an unvarying pace, staying on a set path since the evening that my father had first held the knife and let me see how much he wanted to make sure I never finished my homework for a third grade geography lesson tomorrow. She had been rising out of the dark all this time, finally illuminated by our native sun almost twenty years later while I was photosynthesizing moonlight on the University of Toronto’s deserted summer campus.
I traced her form in my mind, wanting to feel her texture and cold strength, admiring her glittering servants trailing in a respectful coterie of dust. As she neared the invisible orbit that Neptune slid complacently along, her unhurried path out of the vacuum intersected with a luminous ingénue comet, sparkling with all the promise of a young ballerina.
“How lucky for you,” welcomed the girl-child comet, a sphere of sparkling bridal ice unerring in her own set path. “On this sacred trajectory, you will come even closer to the sun than I do once in each of my years.”
“I have been introduced to Suns before,” assured the lady Asteroid, who could afford to be gracious surrounded as she was by a resplendent retinue from all across the galaxy. Precious young comet dazzled by her Sun, she thought with prideful affection. Rolling in her orbit, the comet languished in memories of every close encounter with her great Zeus.
“Not like him,” she confided. “His warmth melts my ice enough to give me a tail that his peoples interpret in so many ways. They have worshipped me, feared me, called me Goddess, called me a blight on their survival. Your trajectory— oh— you will come so close to him…”
“My strength and momentum will carry me beyond his gravity well,” the Asteroid assured this princess, already beginning to pass beyond their moment of intersection.
“I only see him once in each cycle,” she continued, a myth forming in my cavernous rib cage. “But his heat melt the ices I gather out here in the dark… I light up, steaming, brilliant, cloaked in a train they can see on his third child as long as their continents… for only a moment I am almost as glorious as you are with your beautiful veil of meteorites following!”
As the comet preened in memories of her own celebrated beauty that only the sun could thaw out of her, I lay in the off-season athletic field gripping the grass beneath embroidered with dew. I had outgrown the thrill of a powerful man conferring meaning upon me, but her rhapsody rang out in such a familiar key. The comet sang of bridal nights that she always came to newly iced from the dark and ready to be set alight again for millions to admire and fear. She sang with the same frequency of my own remembered raptures, my own poorly-kept virginal oaths. I wanted to stay with her; who was the lady Asteroid to me with her heavy pride and wisdom that I’d yet to come to? But it was the asteroid who’d emerged from the abandoned wells of my mind, and just as she could not deviate from her path I was borne away from the girlish comet with a reluctant longing for her innocence. It was of a kind that I’d never been able to return to since the knife and the hatred and the vile myths that had been written about me two decades ago.
The asteroid bid the perpetual maiden farewell, half-wishing her own mass was great enough to adopt the girl into her entourage to spirit her away from this system to show her true wonders. But the laws of mass, trajectory, and momentum are indifferent to what we wish. A knife is gripped, loathing stains the air, a child believes she won’t live to see her mother again, and the asteroid is launched on a path that no earthly power can interfere with. That path and its consequences can only be predicted by the gods, though I’d had premonitions of a horror the lady Asteroid could not retreat from even as she moved confidently towards our sun. She could not but be infected by the comet’s youthful excitement, for her passage through the void, though accompanied by courtiers with stories from many systems, had been long and uneventful.
Perhaps I may enjoy a moment of thrall that will give us much to talk about when we leave his heliosphere, she thought, passing Jupiter without noticing the treacherous storm that screamed like an ugly bruise on its far flank. I saw her as the single, special swan in the centre of all the corps de ballet, the splendid tayū emerging from her twilit world of silks and incense to parade with measured steps through the town for tradespeople and children who could never afford to see her wonder otherwise, to savour her beauty just for a moment and keep them in good glory for the rest of the mundane year. The weight of the asteroid in my spellbound body was like a blue whale basking on the surface, so heavy I could not rise from the wet grass.
She passed Earth without much concern for their interest in her; sentience in the void was a matter of taste, and the looming sun held far more fascination in its furious heart churning out the very materials that she and her astral coterie were made from. Kneeling now under the same moon that would have been as insignificant as misplaced punctuation to the lady Asteroid, I thought of how suns behave like sentient beings when they near the end of their lives, sensing the crushing force of gravity about to consume them. They thrive off of hydrogen, and as they run out begin converting it to helium in a desperate effort to push back against hungry gravity. But when they run out of hydrogen, they have to convert helium into silicon, and then silicon into a yet denser material, cannibalizing themselves until there is nothing left at the centre of what was once a mighty star but a core of iron… that’s when gravity gets them, as it often does people who run out of nuclear fusion to stave off crushing despair that seeps in from pressure-cracks.
“Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare…” I whispered to the moon, thinking of how the light of red giants, those Kings of Kings, still echoed through time long after Ozymandias had consumed himself. The lady Asteroid still rising out of me knew she was made of many of the same desperate materials that these doomed stars donate to the vacuum. This Sun was incubating child-asteroids and comets and planets within himself, the burning gas only the epidermic layer of a progenitor god. She offered him silent respect as she prepared to pass shy of his corona, close enough to succumb to the trance of heat and power as many young Greek maidens did when Zeus visited them as bulls and swans, ecstatically overwhelmed by their close encounter with the father of giants.
As his heat cleansed her of dust, old grime, and the stillness of the void, I felt the lady Asteroid become young again, a bride as much as the comet, small in the presence of a conqueror… oh, to be conquered just for the fleeting pleasure of surrender—her metals steamed, ran over her form with molten shivers, while her own mass and momentum kept her safe from the gravity of the colossus. His caressing corona allowed her to forget wisdom and silence, leave the stale vacuum of space behind for the glory of nuclear fire that could make even iron quiver and sigh… and with an exquisite, unbearable crescendo, her path brought her safely beyond the sphere of his entrancing embrace.
Refreshed and renewed as she had never before been and cradled in her trajectory, the asteroid wished dreamily that she could tell the comet she had been right—what a mighty husband to set her alight with slow but promised regularity! I clasped my hands over my heart in that field, remembering the promise I’d made ten years ago to the North Wind nine acres behind my father’s house: that I would be bride only to the coldest gusts that flowed up my winter coat like a secret lover my fallible father could never catch or shame me for. “I shall be yours,” I’d sworn, as enraptured at seventeen as I was at twenty-seven, feeling the thrall only a sun, a wind, or a god may share with a human girl who leaves her mortal desires behind in a locked box.
But all blinding crescendos pass, ebbing into lazy consciousness and often regret when one hasn’t accounted for the mines that may lay in the orbital path. I had woken up next to mortal men and crept away in the dawn, believing I could be cleansed only if we never spoke again. How could one truly break a pledge to the North Wind if no sacred words confirmed the transgression? And kneeling in a field not dissimilar to the one I had made that first promise in, I felt the lady Asteroid blearily emerge from her own rapture. She had passed beyond the corona, tingling with molten metals settling into new designs along her transformed skin. Her gravity and momentum had allowed her to know the ecstasy and intimacy of solar communion without being consumed... but everything that made him a uniquely overwhelming lover— his weight, heat, gravity well, brilliance— had stolen every last companion that she had gathered in her millennia of travelling. No small friend of her trajectory had survived the encounter with Wotan’s inevitable weight, pulled down into the plumes of burning gas like gems lost at sea.
Alone, and with the familiar cold of the vacuum creeping back in as she passed beyond the Sun’s warmth, she—I—called out for each member of her—my—retinue that had not survived the ecstatic brush with divinity. Their voices were lost forever into the fires of fusion, to be remade into asteroids and planets themselves someday when she was only a crumbling mark in the side of some insignificant moon that no one bothered to name. Facing the vacuum that could not be turned away from, the asteroid could not know how long she would be alone in the blackness and if it would be long enough to leave her mad in the massive voids between stars.
The dew of the grass became dead-cold against my skin; it had saturated my clothes in a way that no longer rung romantic but instead left me with the empty sense of clinging mildew. No wind blew on the campus fields; the baleful moon above me was indifferent. I felt her inside, my asteroid launched on an uninterrupted path the moment my body first learned what it felt like to fear death at the age of seven. I felt her terror as she faced the infinity we mustn’t gaze directly into, this time utterly alone with no way to know when the silence would end and no one to share silence’s madness with. It was as I walked home, the moon at my back and the featureless Toronto sky concealing any star to give me hope, that I realized this was not a myth.
Like so many things I’d draped in mythopoeic meaning since I first imagined myself being cut into pieces, the Asteroid and the Comet had all the proportions of a legend or creation story. But though it emerged as a myth from the deep well of horror that my mind carefully guards, it was, in truth, a memory. From the moment my father identified his small daughter as a threat to the brittle tales he told himself to cope, my childhood and adolescence became a solitary internment in the blackness that might never end. My mother only protected me in spurts, preferring to believe in the zealous faith-structure my Rasputin father wove about our lives. Any friends I’d made felt like fibrous paper cut from a fabric I could see but not feel. None could sense that the girl in front of them was herself a dying star, inflating herself with myths and stories to push out the heavy, poisonous hatred of a father who made sure she feared that knife every moment under his roof.
If you had told that seven year old girl, trembling in the dining room and looking back and forth between her father’s murderous face and the carving knife he held overhand in front of her, that she would barely feel the warmth of another person’s understanding or affection until she was eighteen, I don’t know how she would have gone on. Though she did: spiralling through empty space creating imaginary friends and mythologizing reality to keep her company in a cold void that might stretch on forever. But as I still hear her voice crying out to me from her ghostly closet twenty years later, I remember that the voice she heard in her dreams through those years is one I came to recognize as my own. Is it madness to hear your own voice in the vacuum, or is a premonition of a safe, loved future just the only way a child Asteroid can spin through the lonely blackness without knowing when, or if, it will ever end?