Outer Space Thoughts: By Willa

     In science class we learn that air is a gas. Only, it isn’t really a gas, it’s a mixture of gases. When people think of air they think its intangible, weightless, sort of empty. Only, it isn’t, because we also learn that gas has matter. It’s small, but it exists. The particles are just so spread out that people think they aren’t there. I wasn’t really interested until someone asked a question.

      Wait, so if the particles are spread out, then what’s in between?

      That’s a good question. Empty space, the teacher said while she beat the eraser violently against the chalkboard to rid of the chalk dust.

      Empty space?

      I looked at the kid asking the question. He was this dumb ginger kid with pudgy fingers and pale eyebrows.

     It’s a hard concept to wrap your mind around, but yeah, empty space. Isn’t that crazy?

     I wondered what empty space looked like. At first I thought it looked like air – transparent, colorless, but then I thought it couldn’t because you can feel and touch air and it has particles and it has matter, and it conducts light which is why you can see everything and air looks like nothing because it shows everything else. Empty space is just nothing.

I thought about outer space, the biggest thing in the world and how it could exist in such small quantities on earth. I don’t like thinking about it.

     The only time I like looking out the window is when I’m in a car. Everything looks like it’s rushing past you even though you’re the one moving and the everything is the thing standing still. I try to look at everything rushing past me but I can only follow one moment with my eyes and then it’s gone and I look at the next thing that’s coming. It’s like being on a fast treadmill. And sometimes I blur my eyes and I can see the picture moving, but I can’t see the detail because my eyes are blurred and it’s frustrating.

     There’s a window in front of my bed. It’s the kind of window where it stretches from the ceiling to the very bottom of the floor and takes up a lot of space. There are trees outside my window and when it’s dark, many of the leaves overlap to form shapes. The nighttime looks light compared to the leaves because they’re so black. I used to be able to see the trees, the leaves, the overlap, the positive space. But then I remembered something from science class.

     The lady showed us a picture of a young girl who was wearing a hat and turning her head. She then told us that it was really an old lady with small eyes. I had to adjust my eyes but I finally saw it and it took a while to get back to just seeing the young girl. I tried seeing the girl and the old lady at the same time but I got a headache.

     And now when I look at the trees outside I just see the shapes made by the leaves. When I’m staring hard it’s nothing special but when I blur my eyes I feel like Christopher Columbus, because it looks like an enormous map, with the white spaces between the leaves as continents and the leaves as the ocean because they’re dark. Other times I think that my room is floating in outer space because the white spaces look like stars and that my room is the only safe place left. And unless it’s daytime I can’t see just regular leaves.