Star Signs

She has freckles all over her back. Some of them are moles, I guess. I’ve been staring at the naked skin for weeks now, or something close to it. I’d like it if she would turn around. I’d like to see her face. But this is alright.

I’m in the half-grimy refrigerated aisle of a supermarket somewhere in Manchester, pushing the trolley unevenly in front of me. It veers incessantly to the left, and I have to re-orient myself and push back heavily to straighten my path. The aisle is set on a slight uphill slope, and I think when I reach the top, I will turn and walk back down the next aisle, then the next and the next, until I find her. The only thing in the trolley is a newspaper, which will tell me about Aries, Taurus, Capricorn, and the rest. I’ll read them all, and pick the one that suits my future best. I was born under every star. I was born on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, every day. My destiny is all around me in the ice crystals forming around boxes of fish fingers and bags of mixed vegetables where the freezer doors have been left ajar.

I think her hair would fall in ringlets around her face, when she had taken the time to style it. I can’t quite discern the colour of her eyes in my mind, though. They might be grey or blue or brown. I trace the patterns of nebulas and star signs on her back, but only with my eyes. I don’t touch.

Jack is crying in the cot on the other side of the kitchen table, I can just about see the top of his head across the scratched and pitted wood. I stand up and cross to him with empty hands. My youngest half-brother is twenty years younger than me and I wonder if he will remember me when he is eight or nine. I hear hurried footsteps from the hall and Grace rushes in with arms outstretched. I recede like water, distantly relieved.
“What did you do to make him cry like that?” She’s angry.
“Nothing.”
There is a small blue blanket with a red hen embroidered in the corner, which is now crammed tightly into the crack between two cupboards. It’s about ten by ten centimetres, and hasn’t been washed in months, one corner made ratty by Jack’s saliva. Grace, who isn’t quite a decade older than me, rocks the baby up and down. His face is red and swollen with tears.
“I’m going to change him, then. Will you be alright here?” She’s still angry.
I nod and sit back down, the chair squealing briefly as it accustoms itself to my weight. She leaves. I am alone.

I am back in my own mind, my own dream of Girl Loves Me, kept tremulously apart by the warm just-waking-up light of a movie memory. The map of her skin unfolds and a sweet scent of longing pervades the air. I think if she knew me she might not love me, but that’s alright because she’ll never know me. She’s safe outside of reality.

I thought I saw her first in a campsite in France when I was twelve. She had buttery blonde hair and a smile with the two front teeth set slightly apart. But by the end of the week her hair was bleached white and her teeth were straight. I thought I met her again at the science fair in Cambridge, where she had a cloud of tightly curled black hair and wore thick mascara on her eyes. But by the end of the day her hair was matted flat on her skull and her mascara had run in sticky black lines down her face. I thought I met her one last time, in a Philosophy class that ran through the night, and she had slender, elegant arms and a slight lisp. But it wasn’t her.

I read all the horoscopes, I chart out the stars rising and the moons falling and the tides and ebbs and flows of my life, waiting, always waiting for the nameless girl who I have never seen the face of, but who I know is the love of my life.

I move out of London, and forget to tell my friends and family where I am going. In three months I’ve ingratiated myself superficially into the office where I work, and got used to answering to Amelia. My desktop computer whines with a barely audible sound that none of the men in my office can hear, but the other women can. I never learned to touch-type, so I work sporadically, then go back and fix my spelling mistakes as I go. In the evenings, I watch reality TV and teach myself how to cook food that I don’t eat. There is a cheap children’s telescope, unused, under my bed. I do not need it. My recycling fills with newspapers, then is emptied. I go back into work. And all the time I am lost in the space of her, an astronaut untethered in the vast reaches of the unknown. The interactions of black holes eat up the panoramic sky — then white holes spit it back out. Dark matter turns itself inside out and becomes known. A thousand sun-stars burn in and out of existence, and star signs break up with the deaths of Regulus, Pollux, Aldebaran. There is a universe out there and I am infinitesimally part of it.

This, I suppose, is close enough to not existing at all.