OVERVIEW EFFECT

If I inflated that personal bubble enough, no one would see my many imperfections, hear the stumbles in my voice, feel the uneven bumps on my skin.

A night I remember in fragments cast over the floor: there’s dancing, and offkey singing, and trash bins filled with glass. My usual comrades were asleep in the basement, so for once I went elsewhere. My head was a hundred miles above my body. Everything was feathery, floating, fears forgotten. So for once, I talked to you.

*

Growing up was a lot of ironed collars and pleated skirts. We learned about personal bubbles; stranger danger; how to scrub behind our molars and wash our hands for thirty seconds and sneeze into our elbows. My best friend was a germophobe—we tried not to breathe each other’s air, rarely touching at all. Even now, reuniting only over winter or summer breaks, we never hug.

It’s fine. I’m not physically touchy. If anything, I wish more people were like her: spaces apart, existing asymptotically. It’s… cleaner, those sorts of relationships. No mess. No exposure to one another’s facial fuzz or pores. No drowning in someone else’s clamminess. We were planets in orbit, free from fear of collision. Nothing more, nothing less. If only things stayed so uncomplicated.

*

One of the loudest voices in my head belongs to someone I barely knew. Ellie burst into high school a year later than normal, tall and unusual, childish in some ways and overly mature in others. She invited me to the pool, the candy store, and the backyard porch. We didn’t call it dating, but, I mean, I was always kind of oblivious, and there’s only so much girls can do with no pretense. Eventually, I backed out. I told myself it was from lack of interest. In hindsight, I can say that it was fright. No one else in high school was so touchy, close-contact, lawless. By that point in our relationship, she was a strange half-fling. I didn’t know her well enough to miss her. Her voice remains a handy conduit.

I mean, Ellie wouldn’t flinch at a handshake, palm already damp with am-I-doing-this-right? She’d kiss with her teeth. She tells me, kiss with your teeth. Press on the outside of clothes. The inside of clothes. You want to be loved, don’t you? People love with closeness. People love in the dark.

*

You, at the party, are that old college movie cliché: likeable, beautiful, just ended things with your long-distance boyfriend. Your usual glitter smooths over any imperfections that might have snuck onto your face. Even as I get closer, no flaws appear, no pixels enhancing into ugliness or roughness or lack of hygiene. You’re pure as fire, and just as untouchable.

Yet you, like many of my college friends, are more physical. I suppose it makes sense; people here are older, more experienced, more secure in their bodies. The first hug I received near stunned me. Stiffly, I hoped I’d put on enough deodorant and avoided too much summer heat. Any hand on my shoulder, any looped arm, any little tap of recognition, cast my thoughts into a frenzy. I searched for excuses to slip away. I wanted to beg my friends to wash their hands. My jaw cramped from the horror, the honor, of being touched in any sort of way. It was just… different. A rift from what I had grown to consider normal.

One time, you and I were on a road trip together, a mutual-friends kind—the kind with too many people and not enough seats. We stared into the back row of a sedan, with maybe one space open for the both of us, if lots of squeezing was involved.

You can sit on my lap, you offered half-jokingly.

Ha, I couldn’t, I replied full-seriously.

In the end, we squished in side by side, my leg propped on the barely-shut car door, your shoulder blade digging into my collarbone. You didn’t smell like anything—nothing bad, nothing good but fake—and you were barely even warm. I shut my eyes and tried to pretend you were luggage. Lots of luggage. No reason to blush at luggage. 

We talked. The time passed. I kept my eyes closed, or, if I must have opened them, I looked out the windows. Streetlights fled past in waves, the stars above them even faster. Cold, white LEDs, the lot of them, haloed in cleansing, burning starbursts. They trailed all the way outwards, down the road, up into the sky, the furthest reaches of places I couldn’t be.

*

I never initiated the hugs, the hand-holds, the conversations. I had long since decided to trade affection for space. If I inflated that personal bubble enough, no one would see my many imperfections, hear the stumbles in my voice, feel the uneven bumps on my skin. I could get in a spaceship, launch myself up, up, up until I was an imperceptible blip, cold from lack of interaction with the wet hot mess of human experience. There’s no dirtiness above it all. I mean, what’s bad about sweat and spit when it’s miles below you? What’s ugliness to someone who’s too far away to see?

*

I pass you by on my way through campus, and I give you a wave, a smile, ask you how your day was. We linger and then move on. Ellie, perched on my shoulder, snorts.

“You’re never going to get to know her better if that’s all you say,” she points out.

“I don’t want to get to know her better,” I say, though of course Ellie already knows that, because she isn’t really Ellie. “I want to wait out the feeling.”

She hums. A vague gesture reveals the occasional students around us, holding hands, ruffling hair, interlocking arms. Once I saw someone cry into someone else’s chests on a bench under a fanning magnolia. Their heads were tucked together, trembling slightly. I stared from afar like I had encountered a scientific discovery—a brand new animal, right there for anyone to see.

“Are you ever going to actually date anyone?” Ellie asks.

“Why would I?” I have homework to do. Emails to send. “How would I? I can’t do the talking. I’m scared all the time.”

Not-Ellie all but laughs in my face. “You think anyone out there isn’t?”

*

The truth I can’t avoid is that intimacy—sexual intimacy especially—is always going to be a little nasty. It’s sweaty and sticky and smelly. It’s hair and spit and grime. The rice kernel stuck behind your molar; the leg fuzz you missed; the dirtiness that comes just from being alive and marinating in the pollution of it all.

Sometimes I wish I could be that impossible, airbrushed barbie doll that everyone else seems to effortlessly embody. I smear on concealer. I embark on the Sisyphean task of shaving (well, epilating) every day. I douse myself in perfume. I cycle through roles, playing the butch, the femme, the businesslady, the nondescript creature in oversized sweats. Jewelry on, jewelry off. Less or more food. Haircuts. Everything showers. Standing in front of the mirror and just willing all the dots and scars and hairs to vanish, to leave something eternally unblemished, irreversibly clean, a paradox of purity and sexual intention. I implement every transformation tactic the industry offers.

It never matters; in the end, underneath it all, it’s still me.

*

The day after the party, one of said mutual friends was teasing me about details that had blurred themselves to death in my memory. Apparently, some vague time after meeting up with you, we’d both grown sleepy over a beanbag chair, and I’d started caressing your arm, telling you that you have nice skin. My friend giggled as I groaned into my hands.

It’s not bad, she laughed. Just funny. I didn’t have the nerve to explain that it could be both—that virtues in dreaming could be sins when awake. And I was awake now, brain unclouded. And I was mortified. 

Then again, who wasn’t ever ashamed of a stupid thing they did? They all survived it. And as much as I grumbled, as much as my friend laughed, as much embarrassment as I felt, the regret never crept in. I realized the difference, sitting there, picturing the blurry outlines of the moment when you and I were no longer asymptotic. I was mortified. But I wouldn’t take it back.

“You heard of the overview effect?” Ellie asks me, which is a good hint that it’s not really Ellie, because she would never have given a damn about niche space facts. I suppose I did, though. Thank the third-grade conviction that I was going to be an astronaut. I’d always thought it would be marvelous up there. Free from small talk, situationships, the smoke stench of gas stations, and Ellie, and the girl at the party, and the mirrors I cry into and the depleted tin of makeup remover on my nightstand and war and public restrooms and tomorrow. The vacuum of the cosmos would suck out everything. Leave me pure.

The overview effect is just a series of quotes, really. Astronauts one after another recounting the feeling of being out, away from it all, a hundred miles above the earth in their ships or stations or suits. Simple musings. Inspirational quotes. Yet also a darkness, or else a sad common trend, under it all.

“Up there you see space for what it is,” Not-Ellie says. “A cold, sterile nothingness, unthinking, unfeeling, unknowing. They hate it up there.” She leans in, grinning, and her face glitches like a hologram, transparent splotches bleeding through her cheeks. Her own unreality doesn’t scare her. “Everything raw and hideous and beautiful is back on earth.”

You have acne. Zits pepper your temple, one painfully red, slightly bloody starburst an inch or so above and between your eyebrows, as you must know. It makes sense, because of hair, humidity, sports, genetics, whatever. The thing is, for all my longing gazes, I never noticed. Not while we were packed into the backseat, not when we crossed paths on campus, not at the party. 

Not until we’re studying together, with pop music in the background and remnants of a conversation hanging in the air, though now we’re all pen scratches and keyboard clicks. I happen to look up while you’re moored in focus. A constellation of stars across your face.

It’s not a negative thing. I take it in, bite my pen, keep blushing and stumbling as usual. Maybe—definitely—no one is really airbrushed, waxed-clean perfection. We’ve all got sweat glands and hairs we can’t quite manage to eradicate. We’re all bundles of flaws, and loved despite them, or else through them. We’re natural. We’re drawn to the natural. 

Your eyes flick up. Whatcha lookin at?

I smile. I don’t break eye contact. It’s me, I tell myself, without Ellie there to jab it through the firewall of my insecurities. It’s still me. Still me, me, me. Close enough to reach out and—

And, well. It’s crashing back to earth. Into the dirt I’ve been running from, the rivers, the brambles, the spring heat. And it’s certainly uglier than distant space, with all its inhuman coldness, its constantly dying stars, but it’s not worth sacrificing, either. It’s a warmer kind of being. It’s messy, it’s sticky, it’s dirty. It’s bright.

AUTHOR: Lizzy Bazldjoo ARTIST: Heidi Lin