Everyone Live Here By Laura J. Oliver

So, I’m sitting at the desk of JT, my personal trainer, and we’re catching up on the week’s pertinent activities before we get to work. I tell him that I just had a steroid injection in my left glute and, oh! that as I was hopping down from the table, the doctor slapped her desk and exclaimed, “You know who you look exactly like?”

I pause for dramatic effect, and JT says, “I hate that question.”

I hate it, too. For good reason. I look at him wondering who he has been told he looks like, but he doesn’t elaborate. (This is his tricky trick. I spill the beans, and he does not.)

“So, who were you hoping she’d say?” he asks.

“Blake Lively?” This is ridiculous. I’m joking. She’s just the first beautiful woman who pops into my head. “Nicole Kidman?” “Emily Blunt?”

“Oh dear,” he says with more regret than necessary. “So, who was it?”

“Jill Clayburgh.”

He looks at me blankly. “I don’t know who that is,” he says, reaching for his phone, and I am reminded that he is exactly 20 years younger.

“Well, she’s dead,” I explain. “So don’t look her up.”

He’s staring at his phone. “Oh, yeah. Dead. But,”…he holds up the phone and squints at me, “I can sort of see it.”

“I hate you for a whole lot of reasons, you know,” I beam pleasantly.

“I know. Get up. Let’s see whatcha got.”

But as we move from one piece of equipment to the next, we start laughing about all the other questions we hate being asked.

“Would you like to try another card?”
“Is that what you’re wearing?”

“Can we talk?”

“Would you step out of line, please?”

“Do you know how fast you were going?”

 My birthday is tomorrow, I tell him, and the question I used to dread was from my mother. She’d call weeks ahead of time before I could possibly know what I might want to do that day, but pretty sure I wanted to do it with someone else, and ask, “Can I take you to lunch on your birthday?”

God forgive me; I resented this. Resented having to give away my birthday, my choice of activity, before I’d had time to even think about it. I didn’t know how to say, “Gosh, Mom, you’re lonely, and you love me, and yes, you gave me life, but honestly, I’d rather spend the day with someone my age who makes me laugh, possibly not related to me.

I’m doing pushups off the weight bench now with intervals of tricep work on the cable pulls. My mind has drifted.

“What? Where’d you go?” JT asks.

I was thinking that it is the birthday of our understanding of the universe, I tell him.

That it’s been 100 years since Edwin Hubble figured out that Andromeda, that distant smudge in the night sky, is another galaxy. And it’s also been a century since Georges Lemaitre determined that red-shifted stars meant the universe is expanding and that if you reverse this trajectory, you find our point of origin, the primeval atom, as he called it, the Big Bang.

“That’s what I was thinking about,” I say, accepting two free weights. “About how lucky we are to have been born here and now.”

Those who have gone into space and seen the world without the demarcation of countries or continents, who have seen just a fragile blue-and-white sphere floating in the black vastness of space, have returned overwhelmed with reverence. I explain that most of us have only seen a photo of this, and that iconic photo almost didn’t happen.

When Voyager One, which had been flying through the solar system since 1977, prepared to leave for interstellar space, astronomer Carl Sagan lobbied NASA to turn the cameras around. He wanted Voyager to take one look back at our home from the edge of forever.

NASA said no. Sagan persisted, relentlessly working his way up through the chain of command until

NASA relented.

On February 14, 1990, 3.7 billion miles from the sun, Voyager turned and snapped her last photo –the iconic “pale blue dot held in a sunbeam,” and said goodbye.

A mere 34 minutes later, NASA powered down the tiny spacecraft’s cameras to preserve her power for the journey into the emptiness of space, where it will be 40,000 years before she approaches any other planetary system. Last month, she was still flying blind, 15.6 billion miles from Earth.

When the photo was published, Sagan wanted humanity to experience our stunning insignificance from a cosmic perspective and our significance from a personal one. He cajoled us, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us… everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives on this mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam…”

Something about that thought moves me, I think to myself on my way home. That every human emotion that has ever been felt has been felt here. That every war, every loss, every act of violence as well as sacrifice and courage have played out on this stage—in the vastness of space, only here.

I don’t know how many more birthdays I’ll celebrate but I do know that on my last, Voyager will still be flying into the unknown, looking for confirmation we are not alone.

I hope I find out first. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking at the stars. Not because I need to be humbled and awed.

But because I am.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.