From my position on the floor, crosslegged like a kid

I went to see my best friend perform. She was radiant, vibrant and completely in control of the room. It struck me—knowing her specific mix of anxieties that appeared over the days leading up to this point—that strangers can so rarely see the emotions hidden underneath. I tend to wonder what it is that they do see and, if what I see in others holds a modicum of truth. The chasm between me and every stranger is a hairline fracture.

I was in awe, starring up at her from my position on the floor,

crosslegged like a kid. In awe of her ability to swindle the audience into laughter and to camouflage herself into appearing so in control of a situation that I knew terrified her. Two abilities exercised in tandem. Later on that evening we went to a place of refuge—a pub, a restaurant, something in between the two. We were joined by friends and performers alike and spoke at length about the magic of two hours prior and the tangled web of half-baked relationships with the potential for more. Lovers, gossip, music interests, the ability for one to find themselves at peace with their life choices even when the choices are, at present, limited.

We trailed off into astrology…

Recently I’ve been reading Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, in it she mentions astrology as a way to make sense of the world. A form of litmus test that recalibrates the protagonists reality. A present that is split up into moments of harsh weather, weariness and incidental deaths. I recognize the use of this understanding as a form of salvation. A poet, F, who performed alongside my friend mentions something about me: ‘your Capricorn sun is in the shadow.’ I laugh out of an inability to understand precisely what she means by this.

We quickly drift off.

The following day, when speaking to my friend about her performance—WhatsApp having a fit over the two videos I so dutifully shot from my position on the floor, crosslegged like a kid—we dwell on this supposed shadow. We are both at our tether for our own individual reasons and so discuss this at length, vying for the ability to win our point of view. Neither one listened to the other,

at least not at first.

The looming presence of potential failure has haunted me in the past few weeks. I bite off the gel polish from my nails, a habit I do not tend towards, leaving little maps of distress in its wake. I am in the process of renewing my visa, a piece of paper provided to me by a group of people that do not know me.

I picture them clocking in

to their jobs, completely unfazed and disconnected from me, or any immigrant for that matter, as a real person—which is to say someone who dreams, who feels things deeply, who has fears. Do they know I buy the pre-seasoned salmon from Lidl because I’m lazy? Do they wonder how often I go to the pub and if my favorite one is named after a monarch? Whether I like marmite or not? Do they ever wonder how many friends I’ve made and if I love them like I love N?

After a few weeks of deliberating,

considerations other than these, they will place my visa—a thick file comprising my finances, my relationship, my contributions to society—in an approve or reject pile. Potentially, this will occur at the end of their working day, or maybe after they’ve had a long night out and come in exhausted or distracted from the nights activities. Or after they’ve dealt with their own life issues that have left them weary, issues that do not concern me as a stranger but are bound to exist as they do for us all.

I fear they will say no.

I fear they will send me back to a country that has never embraced me. That the only place left for me there is the sunbleached religious town that bore me, that drives me into the deepest recesses of my mind, stripping me of everything I am or ever was. I shake the thought away. I know that in my fear I have dismissed my friends relationship to astrology, a relationship that, much like Tokarczuk’s protagonist’s, is centered on salvation.

My salvation has always been fact,

the sinew of something that is indisputable, and the tissues of feelings that do not concern themselves with a greater anything, rather the mundane and unremarkable now. The nothingness that is the matter and energy that metamorphoses from planets to stardust to blades of grass oscillating in the wind at the base of someone’s front porch. This feels tangible to me, but I recognize that this approach is a byproduct of a religious, cult-like, upbringing. I do not believe in a greater power because my memories of greater powers are riddled with oppression. So

I am constantly running away from the idea that I must believe

something that controls what I am or do, that has chosen ‘me’ before ‘me’ ever existed. This feels feudalist: if the stars were to tell me that because my Capricorn sun is in the shadow that I must have trauma, which in present is true, it would have predicted this trauma before it ever happened to me as a kid. The sun is always in the shadow, I was always destined to be harmed. I was always destined to suffer, it tells me. I refute it.

We came back to centre. She explained to me all the things she felt, things that are too personal to share to you, as did I. We lifted our emotional petticoats to reveal what lay underneath. Here, I could feel the sun beam.