Nebula Grieving

TW: Themes of pregnancy loss and sexual assault.

“Hey, Bunny! Think fast!”

My co-worker threw a size-XL pair of men’s tighty-whities at my head and, to my dismay, the crotch landed perfectly on my nose.

“Not funny. That’s absolutely disgusting.” I looked down at the pile of junk I still had to sort through and gritted my teeth, my hand flying instinctively to my stomach.

I was sifting through the bin drop-offs for that day in the suffocatingly humid make-shift storage room, nausea hitting me in waves. New Tomorrow Thrift, where I got my first job two years ago at age 14, hired anyone and used to be a Surf Style. Yeah, one of those painfully annoying tourist traps with a giant chipmunk’s head on everything and a song that made you consider that many 25-to-life wasn’t so bad after all.

I glared at Palmer Caso - “like the cheese-” whose stupid grin made me want to hit him and hug him all at the same time. A senior in high school, he drove the store’s pickup van and sometimes fixed old appliances that were still salvageable.

My name wasn’t Bunny, by the way. It was Easter. At the time of my birth, my mom had been going through Alcoholics Anonymous and had a so-called religious awakening, which she said was thanks to the prayer they said at the beginning of the meeting. She said “Easter” meant new beginnings, and she needed me to be just that. Now, the Serenity Prayer was stained in stale diner coffee and crumpled up in the miscellaneous kitchen “stuff” drawer, and I was suffering the consequences every time roll was called.

My attention shot back to the present. By the time I’d brushed off the diss, Palmer was gone. That underwear toss was the most attention I had gotten from him in almost three months. Things weren’t the same with him since that night we’d had sex at one of the vacant rooms in his uncle’s motel.

After a few months of flirting back and forth and a kiss in the New Tomorrow's sorting room, he’d asked me on what I guessed was a date. He said we’d walk on the beach by his uncle’s motel and then maybe have some alone time. When the night arrived, he’d snuck the key from a drawer in the front while I politely greeted his uncle.

“You kids have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” His uncle, with a full pervert-stache and a beer belly, grinned at us. Surely, he knew.

I knew that I wasn’t supposed to tell Palmer that I was a virgin. According to my older cousin, Faith, that wasn’t something he should know, since he would from then on see me as forever his. That was, she said, because he would have something that can only be given once, to one person, and never be returned.

When we finally did it, it was nothing like I had ever imagined. It was painful, and I didn’t feel like I had much choice in it. He said condoms weren’t an option for him because he had really bad allergies and could stop breathing if he was exposed. I was nervous, but I didn’t want him to have to go to the ER. That had happened to a girl at school one time when she accidentally ate peanut butter, and she had to leave in an ambulance. What would we tell his uncle? I smiled through my tears and said goodbye to him that night under the light of the Waffle House, where my best friend was waiting to pick me up. You can’t make this kind of Florida shit up.

Now I was facing the consequences. When I saw those two lines on the pregnancy test I snuck from underneath my mom’s bathroom counter, I shrieked. There was obviously no one I could tell. So I did what was most logical: I waited for it to go away like a bad sunburn.

In the meantime, I went to work and snuck off to barf near the dumpster outside a couple times a week. The rancid smell made it easier to get it all up. If nobody knew, it was only half real.

I occupied myself with new treasures each day, from typewriters to vintage wedding gowns to musical instruments. But there was one item that made me stop flat in my tracks.

I found it in one of the cardboard boxes dropped off by some red-headed woman who looked like she operated an independent tarot reading business out of her backyard. Brightly colored scarves and tacky jewelry filled most boxes to the brim. But the last box was both the dustiest and the heaviest; I struggled to drag the heavy, dusty box from her pickup truck to the back of New Tomorrow. I thanked her for her donation and waited politely until she drove off to open it, finding a giant telescope and a heavy hardcover book. Orange packing peanuts fell all over the ground when I pulled it out, but I didn’t care. The telescope was like something I’d only seen in movies.

The cover of the book had this mystical green object that looked like smoke rings arranged in a messy swirl. At this point in time, thunder was crackling overhead, and the sky was darkening; it was safe to say that drop offs would be on pause for at least a few hours. And I had time to kill.

I covered the telescope in an old towel and shoved it in the corner. Nobody was taking that away from me at closing time. I laid down on a makeshift bed of old, yellowed pillows and opened the book to a random page as the rain brought cool, wet air in through the garage cracks. I began to read about nebulas, which were regions in outer space where stars were forming. They had all kinds of chemicals in them that I vaguely recognized from freshman chemistry.

A quick Google search taught me that the Lagoon Nebula would be visible to the naked eye in late summer months, the only good news the current month of August was likely to bring me.

I dragged that telescope home with me, setting it up in the backyard that we shared with our neighbors. I looked through it every night to no avail. Although I still knew about my little problem, I kept pushing it to the back of my mind. I sorted through trinkets, kept my head down when Palmer did drop-offs, and looked at the night sky like I was some kind of Galileo wannabe. My favorite size 2 shorts still fit me, so it was still easy to pretend there wasn’t something of a nebula forming within my own body.

One night in the middle of the month, I finally saw it. And it was nothing more than a smudge between two bright pinpoint lights of stars. I had been searching and searching all this time for something that I thought would change my life with its beauty. Instead, it was much smaller and dimmer than I could have possibly imagined.

I guess I bled onto my mattress that night. I woke up thinking I’d wet the bed. In an odd, robotic way, I handled the situation. I walked around the corner and threw the bunched-up sheets in the dumpster. And then I drove to work and unboxed a National Geographic collection. Like nothing had ever happened. Like nothing ever would have happened.

"Our nebula was lost in some parallel universe where all of the hydrogen and carbon atoms mix together again in a whimsical blur."

For a while, I wrote shit like this in my journal about how our “love” was short lived like a life of a massive star. But I eventually burned those pages in a beach bonfire that some vacationers had forgotten to put out. If we want to get technical about it, sure, we’re all made of star dust and only semantics and tens of thousands of years of evolution make that Lagoon Nebula so much different from that pregnancy.

I ended up donating that telescope back to New Tomorrow the same day Palmer moved out of his parents’ house to start at FSU in late August. I didn’t want to look at nebulas anymore. I’d seen enough. Our eyes met briefly when he dropped off a box of some of his old things, but that was it. It seemed like the end of an era.

I guess I thought I would grieve more than I did. About Palmer, about my lackluster finding in the night sky after weeks of suspense. About the red sheets. Maybe I’ll still go to therapy about it someday. I don’t know.

All I really know is that my own stellar evolution is still to be determined.