I. The earth rotates at 1,037 miles per hour.
            A hunk of rock and water and land, of houses and people rushing to work and children dreaming and me. Me, another speck in the vast universe. Me, hurtling through space, round and round and round.
            The world spins. Suburbia, houses upon houses, all identical. The state of New York. The United States of America. North America, South America, all the continents, endless land and people.
            Sometimes it goes too fast. The houses and the trees and the mad blur, the speed too fast for me to track, the swirl of color that hurts my eyes. The talk that swells around me, the talk of TV and social media and pop culture, the actor who divorced again and the actress who recently married, every person on this earth orbiting a different star, in a different solar system altogether.
            And then there is me, in the intersections of these paths, wanting to grab on. Wanting to grab onto the invisible wire holding the earth in its orbit. Wanting to attract like gravity, to enter the circles I’ve never belonged in. Wanting to hold on so I don’t careen away.
 
II. Jupiter has 79 moons.
            Everyone has a moon, at least one. A moon to regulate their tides. To bring them in and out, in and out. To revolve around them like a companion, like trust.
            My brother is my mother’s moon. He sticks to her heels and curls up in her lap and listens to her read stories aloud.
            I don’t have a moon. I am not a moon to anybody. I am unidentified, a conjecture, a postulated mathematical existence, calculable but invisible to the eye.
 
III. Nothing can escape a black hole.
            They are formidable things, invisible in the darkness. Strange, ominous, pulsing, terrifying, places that Newton could not fathom, places where rules break down. Benders of space-time, benders of darkness. The beginning of galaxies.
            I learn about black holes. I Google them, watch videos about astrophysics. Learn that black holes’ gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Learn that if you travel past the event horizon, time slows down. That you don’t notice how things are changing, that you keep breathing and watching the blackness before you and you don’t realize that you are getting stretched from your head to your toes, elongated, mutilated, turned into an unrecognizable thing.
 
IV. Dollar store yo-yos are shit.
            I buy one. It’s bright green. Tacky. But it distracts me from the people, the orbits, the way they are spinning around low prices and getting a good deal and stuffing their carts with brightly colored plastic.
            I am an alien here. A black hole. Invisible, dark, looming, my eyes shut to the bright lights and the voices. I am everything. A moon without a planet, a mathematical question, a small inhabitant on a world that keeps spinning. I am a planet, a wanderer. I am a single dot in a universe of stars.
            The yo-yo breaks halfway to the exit. Green plastic clatters to the floor. My distraction gone, excuse gone, I am forced to look up at a saleswoman. She is not a woman. She is a girl.
            And I’m falling now. Falling, falling, falling into a black hole. Becoming nothing. Falling away from this universe, from all the orbits and the planets and the people, from dollar stores and Walmart’s and Stop & Shop’s and every night and every day. Drifting away like an astronaut without a tether, into the empty black.
            “Sorry about that,” the girl says.
            I look up.
            “For what?”
            “The yo-yo.”
            Black holes can only be seen with X-rays. You need special telescopes. And yet here I am, standing in a dollar store with the lights too bright and the noise too loud, and this girl sees me. She has X-ray vision.