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Chelsea Lane Campbell
Blue Moon
Hello, love. I am writing you a letter from a lunar diner on the way to Pluto, where you said you wanted to visit.
You shuttled into the living room. “I’ve had a bad day,” you said hovering above me on the couch. “So pack your bags. Pluto. Tonight. Are you in?” You grinned.
“Pluto?” I asked. I caught myself before I’d rolled my eyes. “Only twelve people have been to the moon in all of history. Pluto?” You’d mentioned Portland before. You’d mentioned Missoula and Bangkok and Nairobi. But never space, the impossible. I sat grounded on the couch, my knees and feet under me. I pulled tight around my feet the worn flannel blanket your grandmother made.
“Yes,” you said arching down, reaching under the blanket, fishing for a toe or two. “The planet.” I could feel your warm fingers around the knuckle of my long toe.
“I don’t think it’s a planet anymore,” I said, shaking my head, curling my toes away. “Do you mean the moon or rock or asteroid pulled into orbit by mass, by gravity?”
“The same,” you said. Your eyes were wide, full of fantasy. “Pluto! It has moons of its own! Satellites—one that’s half its size.”
It has followers and companions. Like you have me. Then, I felt half your size. Pluto is smaller than the moon. I did a rough calculation in my head. I’d weigh eight pounds on Pluto—nearly weightless. Nearly enough to dissolve into nothing. Enough that a good jump would send me drifting off into space, untethered.
“What do you think it’s like, Pluto?” you asked.
“I don’t know. No one has ever been.”
“No one has,” you said, impatient, breaking character just a little. “That doesn’t stop you from telling me what it’s like. When I was four, I built a rocket ship in my living room: a banana rocker chair fort and a paper-and-marker control panel. I was on Neptune in a matter of seconds. It’s lovely. Tell me about Pluto.”
It’s always been easy for you. The conversation began to remind me of the one we had last week, another the week before, another the month before, about the restaurant you wanted to try, taking a train rather than a plane to your sister’s, the haircut you said would look great on me.
“But I’m hungry,” I said, further withdrawing my feet. You conceded my right to my own toes. You tucked the blanket back around them.
“Oh, I’m sure we can stop for something on the way.”
I picked pills off the blanket, collected them in my hand to throw away later.
“Where would we stop?” I was trying to get on board.
“I trust there’s somewhere between here and Pluto. Let’s go.”
“I don’t think there are many places to get food between here and Pluto. Maybe the space station,” I said, “but I don’t think there’s much else. Can’t we just make spaghetti first? The hamburger is already thawed and sitting in the refrigerator. We need to use it before it goes bad.”
You shrugged your shoulders. “I hate to keep Pluto waiting.”
I know you haven’t forgotten what happened afterward, but this pen feels so nice and I’m still sitting, nearly alone, in this diner, so I’ll write it anyway—a confession, a purge.
I said it, after a long, patient pause: “I don’t want to play.” And then neither of us did.
I made my marinara. An old family recipe, dumbed down. One we have made together a hundred times. One brought over from Italy, so far from home, in America. You even helped by chopping up all the onions as well as the basil, rolling it up into little curls first like I always ask. We talked about coworkers and our to do lists and the pollen count and when we’d last dusted.
As you took a bite of spaghetti, you said it would have been better in near-zero gravity. You smiled, one last attempt. When I didn’t respond, you quit.
“You’re not trying, is all,” you said, after a while, all your lightness gone, the gravity in the room the gravity of Jupiter. “The only reason we can’t go to Pluto is that you aren’t trying.”
And I ate my spaghetti, the only thing I hadn’t let spoil.
# # #
So I’m waiting for you in this lunar diner. Let me tell you how it looks here: I’m staring out of the diner window at the belly button of the moon, Tycho, and the Earth is just cresting over the horizon. It feels just like the sunrise we watched in Oklahoma after spending years in Colorado, and it also feels nothing like that. But I’m here, drinking lunar coffee and writing this letter to you on space paper with a pen borrowed from a nice American commander who has red rings around his thighs, like little planets of their own. It’s a pen with a tiny rocket ship inside it that flies away when the pen is turned upside down, which it is both always and never, in space. Lunar postage is not cheap and I hear it can take as long to deliver as the post in India, back home—all of Earth is home, now—so I should get this letter on its way soon. It needs some time to find you, and I will give it that time. It’s my turn to be patient; you’ve carried that responsibility for so long.
After I finish writing, on my way to the lunar mailbox (those would exist, right?), I’ll go outside and write our names in the moon dust, just like you wanted to do in the coarse sand of the Chilean beach, just like we did in the heavy, wet snow at your brother’s cabin, just like we did with your niece’s chalk on the cracked sidewalk, the long, strong roots occasionally breaking up plates of concrete. Look for those names, beacons, on your way to me here.
So hello, my love. I am at a lunar diner, a pit stop on the way to Pluto, waiting for you. I’m sorry it took me so long, but I’m ready. I’m in.
Now it’s your turn. Play along.
Chelsea Lane Campbell writes: I have an MFA from Texas State University where I was a W. Morgan & Lou Claire Rose Fellow and the recipient of the Judith Caldwell Miller Endowed Scholarship. My work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hunger Mountain and the Southern Indiana Review. I teach creative writing at Southern Utah University.
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