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Cataclysmic variables are stars that erupt in brightness more or less unpredictably... [they] are close binary systems in which a fairly normal, low-mass star gently pours a stream of gas toward a white dwarf. The stream settles into orbit around the white dwarf and forms an “accretion disk,” releasing its gravitational energy as it gradually spirals its way down to the white dwarf’s surface.
Joseph Patterson
Sky and Telescope
October 1998, Page 77
☍
She is four, when she first breathes in the taste of freedom and runs with it, the heat of molten iron brandishing marks into her feet.
Go, and go far, they say, and so she does.
She is made of boundless energy with nowhere to put it, and her parents don’t allow her five blocks past the house at any given point in time. She runs across the grass of her backyard, the wooden surfaces of her bedroom, the hard concrete of sidewalks, and tiles in the bath. She lays back on her bed and runs the soles of her shoes up the walls, and her mother yells at her for getting mud stains on the paint.
She runs because it is all she can do, tracks and memorizes the same five blocks, knows them so well that she can tell when a pebble is missing from the left side. She races invisible opponents, all because she can feel the wind in her hair and the crunch of petals or leaves or snow under her toes. She runs because she is able. And she gets good.
She starts flipping down pathways at the same speeds she used to simply dash through, does cartwheels and dive rolls and dances on her tiptoes on the back of her couch. She swings along tree branches that line her backyard and block her vision from the valley that lays just past them, and she learns how to imagine the places she can’t see. She is fast and strong and stable and for once she feels like UY Scuti.
They have a gymnastics team in middle school, just a coincidence, she knows, but the way her heart ricochets around her frontal cortex like a bottle rocket in a dog house is something completely and utterly new. She has never had a place, somewhere specifically made for her movement before, just a home and some sidewalks and parents who are never around to cook her dinner.
The beam is the back of her couch and the mats are her living room floors. The double bars are each tree that has branches she swung on, and the vaults are the rocks that come inevitably with the alps of Nagano. Instead of committing the pebbles of her neighborhood streets to her memory, she learns the smell of chalk and the brush of air as she back handsprings off the mat. Her fingers learn the texture of fabric and rubber and wood, and she learns to love the tightness of the grips across her palms.
After wandering aimlessly for so long, she wonders if this is her message from the universe, to tell her that this is it, this is where you belong.
She breathes in the gym, and she runs straight home to the pitch-black sky.
☍
She eventually learns she cannot run forever.
From the moment she knows who she is, aged fourteen, ten years after the day she first took to the stars, she feels inadequate.
She grows up, grows with the equipment that feels like old friends, gets better and faster and stronger. Her parents don’t listen to her when she talks about the medals she wins at tournaments, just shoo her off with a wave of a hand and the words that have become second nature (“I’m busy”, “I’m tired”, “I’m doing something”).
“Congratulations.” Her mom says once when she waits to tell her parents until the morning, and she feels her heart light up from the inside out. She runs her five blocks, but they feel new.
First years come as third years leave, she teaches them, they listen. They grow like she has, like she will continue to, and they look at her with their own little stars in their eyes, the ones that she can feel are slowly fading for her, just like the smell of chalk in her airways is becoming an annoyance, rather than a comfort.
She doesn’t know how to name her feelings or the things she knows she is, just that they’re part of growing up, that it’s what happens when your fuel runs out, when your stars die and explode and rebirth as fresh hydrogen. This feeling of inadequacy, fear, leftover like the garbage on her journey as she treks back home from practice, however, is certainly not fresh.
Her friend says it’s called ‘burnout’. She calls it ‘stupid’ instead.
She hates this, the way she feels, and wants to go back to swinging on branches and dancing across the back of her couch like she’s an Olympic gold medalist with all the fans in the world. Her parents don’t help at all, either, with the whole ‘feelings’ thing. She wonders if she’s been doing it wrong. She wonders if she deserves it.
She isn’t much, besides a girl, and she realizes very quickly that the old celestial bodies she was born from aren’t special to her. We are all made of starstuff, as Carl Sagan once said, and she is nothing more than one of many products of the solar system.
☍
Her downward spiral ends with a single crack .
She’s on the floor and her first years are screaming and her coach is calling 119. There’s no blood but her ankle is twisted the wrong way, like an unfolded paper clip, and it hurts to high heaven.
She feels like an alien in this place, in her place, and it’s the worst feeling in the world, worse than all the other feelings she can’t name.
The ambulance comes and her mother meets her at the hospital, where they tell her her ankle has shattered and she’ll need to wear a cast, to elevate her foot as much as possible. They give her pain pills and keep her in for a few days, just to make sure she’s healing properly, that there’s nothing more wrong, like a broken toe or a clogged artery or a heart torn in two.
Her mother says nothing more than; “It was bound to happen. You’re too rowdy.”
Bound to happen. Too rowdy.
She lets these words sink into her skin, even when her team comes to visit her in her hospital bed that smells like bleach. She doesn’t let go of them when they give her flowers, and bring her grips so she can have “motivation to heal faster”. She keeps the words even when she doesn’t have the heart to tell her friends and juniors the grips are the last gift she’d ever want to receive.
She knows them, feels them, holds them, even when she’s released with crutches and “good luck!” from one of her nurses when her dad picks her up and tells her he loves her on the drive back home. She doesn’t know if she believes him, even though he’s different from her mother, soft around the edges but busy all the time. She doesn’t allow herself to trust him even though she wants to, and doesn’t dare to ask where her mother is when they walk into an empty house with the lights all off.
She could’ve been compositions or poems or songs. She could’ve been the sun or UY Scuti or entire constellations, but was left with a fractured fibula as a lonely, normal, low-mass star.
“Why?” She mumbles into her hands, leg outstretched on the table in front of her. The cast is claustrophobic, makes her nerves itch with the desire to kick and bite and swear at the universe that failed her. ‘ Her place ’... what a joke.
If that was a gift from the universe, this is a warning.
☍
She does not return to the fabric and the rubber and the wood in which she felt most free, even when her ankle heals and she does not wobble on her toes. The universe had taken her stability once, and she does not want to risk losing it again.
She graduates middle school, and her first years still look up to her, tell her they’re proud. She has a diploma and no passion, a dream that flew far, far away, to burn on the surface of some distant binary star system. She walks down the same five blocks, memorizes each pebble once more, knows what it’s like to be tied down by the sky.
They have a gymnastics team in high school, just a coincidence, she knows, but the way her heart ricochets around her frontal cortex like hail in a junkyard is old and worn and sore.
She walks away from the signup sheet before she even has the conscience to pick up the pen.
☍
She has a few lovers throughout college, where her confidence regains itself if only slightly, when she’s in a place where she can study what she wants. She majors in astrophysics and learns the placements of the stars she sees behind her eyelids while she sleeps, the ones she lost the chance to touch with no more than a split bone and an absence of strength.
She meets a girl in her Thursday lecture, with dark hair and a grin that spreads the expanse of her face and freckles that fold over her cheeks and down her neck, under her shirt where people can’t see. Her eyes never lost their stars, and they gleam against the rivers of honey the universe decided would befit her.
This girl looks like the galaxy she wants to trail her hands down, wants to swim in her irises and drown in her warmth. She likes this girl, even though they’ve spoken maybe twice, even though it might be the worst thing that ever happened, even though the girl isn’t the actual starlight she so craves.
I like a girl. She cries to the clouds, instead of questioning it further. I like a girl, and I want to ask her on a date.
She tells her mother because she is impulsive and stupid and no matter how much she distances herself from the idea, she’s still a little girl in an adult body and she just wants her mom to tell her everything will be okay. “I like a student in my Thursday lecture. A girl.”
Her mother tells her that she’s wrong.
“How do you know?” She seethes over dinner, with her husband soothing circles into her shoulder, a futile attempt to calm her. “No. No daughter of mine will like girls. Forget it. Don’t think about that ever again, or you will not be allowed back at this table.”
She does not ask the girl out on a date.
☍
After she graduates, she meets a man who was born into the name Hoshiumi.
He is tall and kind and smart and happy, and he lets her ramble about star clusters, asks her to point out each one she loves the most. He takes her to the local planetarium for their third date and Yellowstone for their honeymoon, where they camp out under the sky. She learns to trail her fingers down arms that are longer than her entire torso, instead of ones with freckled constellations.
She loves him. She marries him. She takes his name like a form-fitting glove, but it attaches itself and sticks right to her body like it was simply an extra layer of skin.
She inks her chest with it, a star and the ocean, on the layers of flesh woven right above her heart. She gives it the time to heal and allows it to be hers. It is the first time she has contact with the place from which she came.
Her names change. She is now Hoshiumi- san to most, Hoshiumi- chan to the old lady next door who asks for a cucumber from her garden every Sunday, and Hoshiumi- sensei , even, by one tiny boy of whom she tutors on Sundays, and it burns holes into her eardrums and she pretends she doesn’t hear.
She likes her husband and her new name. She likes this person, who she is now. She no longer speaks to her mother, spends her days in and out of the same local planetarium where she works as a licensed astrophysicist, gets to talk about the stars she holds so close, even if she is chained by the gravity of the Earth.
She doesn’t think about gymnastics or the girl she once liked or anything, really, because it is all cruel memories of things she’s grown out of, like her old baby clothes still in her closet or swinging from branch to branch in her backyard or the chase to the sky.
She likes Hoshiumi . She likes helping people, being a tutor and a museum worker and a lover. She likes feeding her energy into what can make people fly, blast off to heights she knew she could never reach herself.
She may have lost her opportunities, but Hoshiumi can help people find theirs.
☍
When her first son blinks his eyes open, she cries.
He is so light in her arms, but her heart is a paperweight in her chest and she clutches as hard as her arms can hold because if she lets go for even a second he will fly into the atmosphere to reside among the things she had once dreamed and lost.
She wants to give him a name that she couldn’t place for herself, something bright like his eyes and new in the universe. She wants him to have the freedom that left her. She wants to allow him to fly.
She names him Akitomo, for the sun at dawn. He is absolutely not a useless star, she decides. He will be brilliant, cause every celestial event that she had learned in class. Eclipses and solar winds and supernovas.
In exchange for his brilliance, she will not be her mother. Even if he turns out to be as useless as a rocket without thrusters, she will not be her mother. She will uplift him, protect him, let him know love. She will go to sports games and science fairs and if he breaks a bone she will hold him in her arms when they ask him to pick his cast color.
She will not be her mother, and he will not be her.
☍
Her second son, her second star, looks like her. He has the same flat white hair that boys in her class used to pull and the same broad grin that got her into trouble. He runs up and down streets the same way she used to, has memorized the rocks that line their sidewalks, and Hoshiumi is afraid.
Kourai is just like her, short and stocky with a body built for flight, for jumping and tumbling and running and crashing back down with a weight that’s heavier than his own. He is a white dwarf growing from the rubble, the aftermath of Hoshiumi’s own burnout, exhausted of her own nuclear energy.
He chooses volleyball, not gymnastics, and Hoshiumi knows what will happen. He will collide and fall and break into pieces, dreams that detonate and send shards of glass flying, stars at the end of their life that erupt gas and energy, destroy planets far larger than this one.
“Volleyball, huh?” Her husband smiles down at her, and she can’t help but smile back, even though the world might as well have ended. He really is a star, too. “Wonder if he’ll stick with it.”
“Who knows!” Hoshiumi says as cheerfully as she can because there is no reason to spew her worries to anyone but a bathroom mirror in the wee hours of the morning when everyone is asleep.
Volleyball, indeed.
She watches it with Kourai on television, remembers the plays, the positions, the rules of the game. This could be it, could be the end, and even though Kourai does not falter, Hoshiumi does not want him to start.
She lets herself know volleyball just like she knew gymnastics because if Kourai is going to be Hoshiumi just as she is, she will not allow him to go on his adventure alone.
☍
“It’s no fair!” Kourai cries. “Dad is stupidly tall. Big brother is stupidly tall. But not me. I’m short. How come it’s only me?!”
Hoshiumi can see her mini-me crumble before her, his eyes watery and hands shaking with pent up rage. She knows the feeling, even if it wasn’t made of contempt for lack of height, and she is determined. If she can’t be a blue giant, she will feed Kourai all that she has.
“Hmm. Good question.” She ponders. “Genetics, maybe?”
Kourai responds with simple silence. He has a presence even then, and she laughs.
“I mean, your grandpa is super short too!” Hoshiumi remembers her father’s tired eyes and cracked front tooth. She hopes he’s okay. “Heck, nevermind him. I’m super short! Anyway, what’s so bad about it?”
“I can’t beat any of the tall guys.” Hoshiumi can practically see the solar winds from Kourai.
“Oh, really. You can’t beat any of the tall guys because you’re short? There isn’t one single way you could ever win against them, ever?”
Hoshiumi thinks back to when she was young and impressionable and scared. When the beams felt too tall and her teammates too overbearing and she wanted to rip her grips from her hands, never touch a parallel bar again. Who needs giants when you’re still on the ground?
What would she have wanted her mother to say?
“Hey, Kourai?”
He turns to gaze up at her, this tiny little person who is so much like herself, who knows pain and frustration and elation all the same. He has passion. He will have the strength to move forward.
“There probably isn’t any way to make yourself taller…” His face falls. “But didja know? There are lots of ways to make yourself stronger.”
Hoshiumi thinks of Kourai’s older brother, who was born with her husband’s stature and athleticism that rivaled even the best. She thinks he might be a good volleyball player, too, sure, but he’s not the one with the dream.
“Now, I’ve only told you this, not your brother.” Kourai leans in, the promise of a secret too enticing to not indulge. Hoshiumi smiles her warmest smile at him, puts her finger to her lips, because he deserves to feel the acceptance she wasn’t given.
“Start working now and you’ve got a shot at beating him at being stronger.”
☍
He is. He is stronger. He flies, higher and higher and higher, and doesn't crash back down to Earth. He is the UY Scuti she couldn’t be.
☍
“I like boys,” Kourai says once when he’s visiting from school. They are sitting on the back porch, drinks in hand, watching the clouds pass at midday. The sky is a bright, bright blue, and it’s warm, wind chimes calling from where they dance on a string, and the sun feels good on the skin.
Hoshiumi almost buckles over at the knees, even though she’s seated. “What, Kourai?”
“I like a boy named Hirugami Sachiro.”
She practically chokes on her tea before straightening her back and turning to face him.
“Okay,” She says.
“Is that alright?” Kourai doesn’t blink as he shifts his head to look up at her, only by a little, eyes round like saucers, a faint blush on his cheeks. He is a star even when he isn’t trying, she decides, and she smiles. She is still not her mother.
“That’s fine, Kourai.” Hoshiumi rubs her palm across Kourai’s hair, tousled only slightly by the breeze. It feels like feathers, a complete genetic reprint of her own. “Does he like you back?
She may not be her mother, but Kourai is starting to become just like her.
☍
She watches her second star get gold at the Olympics.
Hoshiumi no longer chases after signs from the universe, only follows her whims and her own two stars and the life she’s built for herself. Her mother does not text her on her birthday, but Akitomo sends a video of him and Kourai of them on the train up to visit her, smiles that reflect both the darkest of nights and brightest of days, filled with joy and still-intact dreams and entire galaxies of hope.
“WE LOVE YOU, MOM!” Kourai screams, and Hoshiumi starts shushing him, even though it’s a video and he can’t see her. “We’ll be there in about an hour! You and dad better not have too much fun without us!”
There is a place for every star, Hoshiumi decides, with all her endless knowledge of them, whether it is the only known solar system to hold life or a hypergiant with a radius around 1,700 times larger than the sun. She was born from something for something, for the screams that burst forth from her mouth when she watches Kourai smack back down on the floor.
She may be a cataclysmic variable star system, a boring low mass star who’s only duty is to feed her energy into helping her white dwarf erupt in light, but he smiles at her where she sits in the stands and she thinks that this might be how she flies, after all.