Artwork by Rosie Giuliano

I almost got hit by a car crossing the street yesterday. The driver was an old man, and he smiled as I apologised, stepping back onto the sidewalk. He waved me across, and the woman beside him—his wife, I assumed—smiled too. I ran across the road and apologised again. I had been watching the Earth get closer. The greyish semi-circle was quickly becoming a blue and green sphere as they approached it, and I had been watching when I almost got hit. The six-minute blackout was fast approaching, according to the voiceover. He reminded me and the three million others watching that in those six minutes, there would be no contact at all.

I kept walking, looking up more often, and thought about those fast-approaching six minutes. About being in a metal bell hurling through the darkness, and being swallowed by fiery plasma before it melts into nothing, and the sky becoming as blue as the water they would soon plunge into. My bus was late. The bus was always late. I sat on the cold metal bench and watched the people in Mission Control stand and stretch and sit down and tap their fingers on their desks and their shoes against the floor whilst the voice reminded us that it had only been two minutes.

When the bus finally arrived, and the six-minute blackout was over, the feed cut to a white ball of light streaming through the sky. I started to cry. I thought it looked like a shooting star, or like love. I thought about the man whose car I had almost ended up underneath and how he smiled at me. I thought about bells and I thought about music.

It all fell in the river and it sank like little bells

Little bells

***

I was afraid, sitting there by the pool. I rolled up my sleeves and plunged my arms into the water and it was cold enough to sting. Our breath hung in the air and his hand around me was shaking. Maybe he was afraid, too. Or maybe he was just cold. It was late June and it was dark and we could see stars—the ones that glowed brighter than the streetlamps and headlights. The voice in my head told me this would be a six-minute blackout—a period of zero communication between us. There was only the freezing water, the stars in the sky and the warmth of his body next to mine.

I did not feel love that night, but I feel it now. I feel love in how I sat in the backseat of the car on the way home while the warm voices of friends frosted up the glass windows. How I sat on the floor of my bedroom and sobbed until my eyeliner melted and dripped down my cheeks, leaving marks like contrails on a freezing morning. A trail like the white light behind the sinking bell: coming home, coming home, coming home.

I went to bed with my face stained and splotchy, and I went to work in the morning wearing the same clothes I wore to the party—the same clothes I slept in. And when I sipped the coffee I ordered as the sun rose, I thought about how it was hot like jet fuel. How it was burning like love.

There are wedding bells and funeral bells. Christmas bells that jingle in family homes and bells that sing over hospital speakers as babies scream in their mothers’ arms. Bike bells are shrill and drowned out by children’s laughter, and the doorbell rings three times before the vacuum turns off and footsteps grow louder. The bell that fell down to earth—the silver bell that sank through the atmosphere—did not make any sound at all until it hit the water. Then it rang out louder than any bell I’d ever heard. It echoed like cheers and claps and tears; it sounded like shouts and hugs and laughter.

***

When we were confined to our homes and warmth came from the blue light of laptop screens, I would look at the moon and think about how someone, somewhere, was looking at it too. I would feel less lonely. I thought the same on the pier in the dead of night, leaning on the shoulder of an old friend and whispering secrets to the sea, and I thought the same on the other side of the world on limestone steps under yellow streetlamps. I thought about them on the bus while I held the warm blue light in my hands. I wondered if they had looked at Earth and felt what I felt when I looked up at the moon.

I was born under a waning crescent. I grew and she shrank and then she grew, too.

The car with the old man and his wife was a waning crescent.

But I was born on day 23.

I cried on the bus when the metal bell sank, and I cried when they held me up and passed me to my mother, because the bright lights were too much for my new eyes that had never been opened before. The little bell fell in a burning ball of plasma that shone through green and purple pixels, and that pumps through veins, and from all of it came something else. Something ancient.

And from all of it came love.