20th
Tori finally got the wiring figured out on her made-in-Hong Kong/ordered-through-Japan star projector. She sat in her room in silence for a while, in the dark. I heard her shifting things around upstairs. She came down to tell me she didn’t know any of the constellations. She said, “I think they’re Asian.” No recognizable Big Dipper, no Orion, seemingly a whole other vault. I’m still not certain what we’re looking at. Star maps are the same to me as algebra, or those models of chemicals: elegant but indecipherable. We brought up the camera. Tori insisted on the placement of the projector in the photo. She wanted proof for her fiancé that she fixed the light. To stop myself from laughing during the thirty-second shutter exposure, I thought about how sexy and intense Caleb Crain’s voice is while he reads Chapter 4 of Moby Dick.
