teachers gathered them up to take them to the school bus waiting outside. One boy, probably five years old, tugged at my pant leg as I was walking away. He looked up at me with wide, blue eyes. “Sometimes my father hits me and I fall down. Does that mean my father is gravity?” said the little boy. “No, not exactly” I whispered to the boy as his teacher tugged at his arm. I spent the rest of the day thinking about what that little boy said to me. I wondered if he could adapt to the situation. The study of finches in the Galapagos Islands proved the concepts of adaptation. So if a finch can change beak shape and size over generations, then could people adapt to the horrible situations around them in the same way? Out of my three years working there, that moment was one that weighed heavy on my heart. I heard her calling my name, and I was once again brought into the reality of my surroundings instead of being pensive in some psychological flashback of misrepresented and misidentified meanings and reasons. Her eyes reflected the stars in the sky. They looked like oil fields burning in the night, slowly intensifying as her pupils dilated, the blue iris growing smaller as the emptiness of the pupil took over. She asked me if I loved her. I tried to think of some profound, romantic statement to make, but all that came out of my mouth was yes. She leaned in and kissed me, as millions of microorganisms were transferred in a single second. I pulled away and lay back down on the grass, staring up once again at the stars. That kiss was nothing like I imagined. Even years later, I still think about that moment. I thought about the millions of boys that kissed girls every single day. The world population is seven billion and growing. People from every gene pool kissing and breeding, over and over. So this one kiss, albeit my first kiss, was really nothing special on the larger magnitude of this data of kissing interactions. It was nothing important. I study astronomy because of the beauty of the unknown. Down here on earth we have statistical data on the financial impact of war, on the number of automobile related deaths per day, on the murder rates in the United States in regions of less than ten thousand people, and so many other lists of useless data. These numbers though, don’t comfort me at all. How can the human race know so much and still know so little at the same time? I am surrounded by facts. I am grounded here on earth by the gravitational pull that Newton insists remains constant, yet I yearn for the weightlessness of space. But as long as I am bound to earth by the gravity of love, of hate, of other emotions that seem irrational but at the same time innate of the human race, I must remain content that one day, I will experience the feeling of weightlessness, and the release from all that holds me down.
6