Space Junk Hurtling Through Rome

By Danila Botha,

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. I covered my puffy purple jacket with layers of tin foil, and when my brother’s third goldfish died, and he decided he was done forever with trying to have a pet, I washed the bowl with dish soap and wore it over my head as part of my space helmet.

For my birthdays, I wanted all things outer space; books about the planets and female astronauts like Mae Jemison, trips to the local planetarium, cartoons and movies about walking on the moon. I didn’t know much about visualization, but I pictured it every night before I fell asleep, wearing the heavy space suit, sitting inside a rocket, ascending higher and higher into the sparking, dazzling blue, seeing the enormous feathery clouds, the charcoal, crater filled surface of the moon, enormous balls of brightly glowing gas, like giant, flaming balloons that looked like tiny pinpricks from earth, the seven flaming rings of Saturn.

When I finally got there, I told my best friend Morgan, I’d take photos and videos for her, so she could feel like she was there too. It was going to be the greatest experience ever, and I felt sorry for her that she was going to miss it. She rolled her huge brown eyes at me, her long eyelashes fluttering in every direction.

“Get real,” she said. “Like, why do you think it’s even going to happen?”

“Because it is,” I said to her, my ten-year-old teeth clenched. I knew, with every fibre of my being that one day I would prove her wrong.

Except I didn’t.

Sometimes when I think back on it, I feel like a professional killjoy of my own childhood dreams.

If I’m feeling generous when I think about this stuff, I could say that what I do as an adult is space adjacent.

Morgan retained her healthy skepticism of everything and became a corporate attorney, and I became an environmental scientist who monitors the effects and dangers of space debris.

Instead of marvelling at the majesty of the universe I monitor firsthand the destruction it causes. I lobby for governments to have stronger policies against it for public safety.

It’s strange, the trajectory of my career.

I always imagined I’d go out and do things, I never saw myself as an academic, sitting on the sidelines, professionally watching as the things I once dreamed about turn the earth into a cosmic landfill.

My partner, Joe, sometimes helps me to take my mind off things. People who know us sometimes make jokes about how opposites attract. Morgan used to tell people I was coming home from studying Geosciences in grad school, when I walked by a construction site and Joe wolf whistled and catcalled me.

Incidentally, my university and his construction site were both about five minutes from the bar we met in.

I’d never been much of a drinker, but I was sitting on a stool at the edge of a table, with my thesis supervisor and two other grad students, slowly working my way through a pint of Guinness, my fingers wrapped tightly around the bottom of my glass, when I felt someone crash into my back. He was sweet, and apologetic, with long hair and an open smile, and I found myself telling him later that I was relieved, that when I felt his elbow making contact with my shoulder blade, it really hurt, but at least I felt something. Everyone I go to school with thinks too much, I found myself adding, and it’s always depressing, the state of the world, and how what we think of as progress is actually destroying it, you forget how to be present, how to be alive, how to just be.

He kissed me, and everything faded to midnight blue.

He was eight years younger than me, he’d only made it through one semester of college, our backgrounds and religions and families and friends were completely different, but it felt like freedom mixed with awe, like the time I was jumping barefoot in muddy puddles with Morgan when we were little, and we froze when we saw a shooting star streak across the sky. We had to keep confirming that we’d really seen it, that at was as beautiful as we imagined it would be, a sign that there was more to life than everything we’d seen in front of us.

At his work, there was more than one guy name Joe, and when I stopped by the site and asked for him the first time, someone yelled out Guiseppe, and he came running over, a huge smile breaking out on his face when he saw me, strands of light brown hair from his pony tail coming loose and flying around his cheekbones, his neck smelling as fresh as the bright spring air.

He started his day at 5:30 am, and finished by 3:00, so by the time I moved in with him, he was cooking us dinner every night, his hair still damp from the shower. He smelled like a citrusy combination of Ivory soap and medicinal, minty Head and Shoulder’s shampoo, with the faint dryness of fresh kicked dust.

He always wanted to sleep with the windows open, even when it was below twenty degrees outside. I started wearing his baggy t-shirts and sweaters to bed, which he said was kind of sexy, which made me laugh. He said he liked my black glasses, and I finally had an excuse to stop wearing contacts. He had to go to bed early, so he didn’t mind if I stayed up at night doing research or working on papers.

Being with him was like crawling into a candlelit, fleece covered cave.

We drank wine, red or white, whatever was cheaper, and watched Love is Blind or Love Island marathons. He was surprisingly good at doing British accents. Sometimes he’d come onto me using Love Island slang. “Love,” he’d whisper,  you’ve got so much sauce, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. You make me act like a tuna melt.” We’d both start laughing. Sometimes he’d put a hand on my thigh and say “C’mon Babes, it’s time for some NVQ3,” and I’d roll my eyes and slap his hand away, but not longer after, we’d be having sex right there on his flannel blanket, our asses leaving imprints and gooey stains on his beige Ultrasuede couch.

For a few weeks we watched Dancing with the Stars and practiced dance moves in our living room- he got pretty good at Samba. He’d watch the moves carefully, replaying them slowly, the speeding up so that we were spinning wildly, laughing and tripping and forgetting everything except whatever move we were trying to do. I felt lighter than the parchment paper he once used to make biscotti. I was giddy.

I didn’t talk to anyone much about it. Morgan was convinced I needed to be with “an intellectual equal with more ambition.” Her boyfriend was sixteen years older than us, and a stockbroker, and since she’d been with him, she’d become obsessed with all things 90’s, despite the fact that we were only alive for the last four years of it.

“Joe’s like, your version of Novocaine for the Soul,” she said to me one day.

“I have no idea what that means.”

“He’s like an escape drug. It’s from this song, Brett loves them, this indie rock band, the Eels.”

She cued up the song for me on iTunes, and then another song by Elliot Smith called Between the Bars. I liked the second song better, but I was still offended.

I typed Get the Fuck out of My House into my iTunes and a song by 2Livecrew that I’d never heard before blasted out of my speakers.

I started laughing as soon as I heard the first line, and eventually she did too. She never brought it up again.

When I met his parents, they were friendlier to me than mine were him, but there was unmistakable suspicion. I told them how much I loved space as a kid, how the first puzzle I could remember doing was of a mouse on the moon, biting into it like it was made of cheese, and I wanted to know everything about the moon after that, which lead to a lifetime love of everything connected to outer space.

His youngest sister asked if I loved space so much, why didn’t I become an astronaut. I tried to explain how physically tough it was, how NASA had such rigorous standards, and anyway, I liked research and ideas, but I could feel her eyes glazing over. One of his brother in law’s told me he had a PHD, then pointed to his crotch and I cringed when everyone around me started laughing.

His Nonna eyed me warily when I complimented her on her cannoli’s. The combination of the creamy, not too sweet centre, and the crunchy dark chocolate covered wafter was perfection. And what do you like to bake, she asked me, and I shrugged. Not much, to be honest, I started to say. And what about cooking? She frowned when I told her loved all the eggplant dishes she’d served, her parmigiana di melanzane, and pasta ala norma, because when she asked if I liked to garden, to grow my own vegetables like her, or cook, I told I’d never really thought about it.

My parents had a major issue with the fact that they were practicing Catholics, despite not exactly being religious Jews themselves. For a psychiatrist and a nurse practitioner, who’d been divorced for years, but who united when it came to disagreements with their kids, whose religion was peer reviewed, evidence-based science, it felt vaguely ridiculous. They made arguments about tradition and cultural continuity, as if we lived our lives on the set of a modern version of Fiddler on the Roof, instead of being people who drove exactly twice a year to temple for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. When I pointed this out, they pressed on and on about antisemitism.

“Look,” I finally snapped, “if they have a problem with me, it’s because they think I’m an overeducated anti-trad wife, not the fucking antichrist.”

They backed off after that, and I decided not to mention going to my first Baptism or Midnight Mass, or how relieved Joe’s family looked that I went along with it, that I ate the dry wafer and even tried crossing myself once, just to see how it felt. A part of me was disappointed that I didn’t feel anything, not that I felt much connection to Judaism either.

Mostly, I felt like a bad actor, an extra in a scene in someone else’s life that was supposed to be meaningful. I wondered if there was something wrong with me.

Joe wasn’t religious either, but he did like making his mom and grandmother happy.

After I graduated, I officially got my job, and a few months later, Joe got promoted to site supervisor. We finally had money, and he surprised me with tickets to Italy. We would spend a few days in Rome, and then head to Reggio di Calabria to meet some of his relatives.

We started researching Rome before we left. We hiked in the heat to see the Pantheon, and the Colosseum, standing as close as we could, struck by their enormity and sense of history, imagining them in their prime, imagining ourselves in Ancient Rome.

We ate pistachio gelato and square shaped pizza and walked arm in arm down busy streets, into tiny shops packed with stacks of leather purses and lace and linen tablecloths.

The nightmares started after we went to see St Peter’s Basilica and the Sistine Chapel. He booked tickets in advance to both, and we were holding hands staring up at Michelangelo’s frescoes in the ceiling of Sistine Chapel, eyeing the naked bodies and slightly cracking paint when he announced that the next day, we were going to visit the Great Synagogue of Rome.

“Why?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Because, it’s like really famous.” He said, “and you’re Jewish, don’t you want to see it too?”

I looked it up on my phone. “I don’t know.” I said. “It’s Orthodox. And tomorrow’s Saturday. If they let us in, and there’s a service, they probably won’t even let us sit together.”

“You think they’d know that I’m not Jewish?”

“Probably, plus people always tell me I don’t look Jewish.” I look at my reflection in my phone, my blondish hair, my blue eyes and small, neat nose.

“I think we should go anyway. I already bought tickets. Besides, we can always just leave. I have the whole day planned.”

I kissed him. “Okay,” I said finally. “If you really want to.”

We got to the synagogue just after 10:30 am the next morning. Outside the main entrance stood two beefy security guards wearing full on army fatigues. They looked like fully grown real life GI Joe’s. One was holding a big gun.

“What’s going on here?” I asked. The one explained, in a heavy accent that antisemitism was a real concern. “We have to be here, he said, to protect the people.”

The other looked over at Joe and pointed to his head. “Very good,” he said, “not to wear a kippa on the street. It’s safer.”

Joe nodded like he knew what the guy meant, and I looked down at the street, not knowing what to do or say.

Once we were inside, he pulled out his phone. “Oh wow,” he said. “There was an actual terrorist attack here a long time ago.” He started reading from his phone. “On Oct 9^th, 1982, there was an attack carried out by five terrorists that killed a two-year-old and left dozens of civilians injured.”

I tried to take that in.

We moved further inside and as I’d guessed, we had to sit separately. The service was all in Italian. I couldn’t read Hebrew well, so I found myself staring at the endlessly high ceilings, and grand columns, the menorahs and lights and fancy balconies, the grandeur I’d never known a synagogue could have. There were women around me wearing fancy dresses, but there were other women who sat there casually, in pants and t shirts, taking in the spectacle.

Joe and I texted each other as discretely as we could.

He asked me if I was okay, if I wanted to see more of the Jewish ghetto, and I was surprised to find that I did want to.

He’d arranged for us to join a walking tour. Raphaela, our Jewish tour guide who’d grown up in the local Jewish community explained how it was set up in the 1600’s, how Jews were forced to live there and stripped of all their rights by order of the Pope. His goal, she explained, was to make life so difficult for Jews that they had no choice but to convert to Catholicism.

They were forced to attend church on Sundays but weren’t allowed to fraternize with Christians.

Jewish men had to wear a large cone decorated with bells whenever they left the ghetto. Jewish women had to wear the same sign that identified prostitutes. The only work they could do was rag trading.

She handed out some photos of other Jewish ghettos in Italy. The Venice Ghetto was especially hard to look at. It was still surrounded by heavy walls, complete with barbed wire. It looked tiny and claustrophobic, like the only possible freedom was the sky above them.

Joe took my hand, and we walked a little, then took an Uber back to our hotel.

“I had no idea,” he said quietly, “about any of this.”

“Me either,” I admitted.

My dad’s family were Polish Jews who left Europe in the twenties, and my mom’s family were Sephardic Jews from northern France who hid wherever they could during World War II, including in brothels, before they eventually illegally crossed the border into Spain, then Portugal and eventually made their way to North America. My grandfather always made it sound like an adventure, the ingenious ways they outsmarted the bad guys, unexpected heroes whose prize was to make it out, to a better life. All of his immediate family survived.

That night my dreams were full of visions of destruction, space junk hurtling through Rome, satellite debris, of all sizes and weights, coming down at unimaginable speed and weight, damaging all the buildings we’d seen, smashing windows and art and raining down on toddlers walking down the street, crushing the hands of their parents, knocking them over. I could hear the screams, the shock and fear, the pain. I could see their faces, watch the panic and helplessness. I was back home, sitting at my desk at work, watching a live feed and all I could do, all I was supposed to do, was track and monitor it all. I had to write a report, but I couldn’t stop crying.

I woke up sweating beside Joe, who slept deeply beside me, his legs tangled in one of the hotel’s silky blankets.

I didn’t know how to explain it anyway, the horrible helplessness of knowing that the more you try to know and understand, the less in control you feel of anything.

Later that day, we walked by the Trevi Fountains, and dropped some coins in the water. I wished for a safer future, and the feeling that I was really doing something that mattered, that someway, somehow I could make some kind of difference.

That night, walking arm in arm on a wide path through the Borghese gardens, surrounded by tall green trees, whose branches twisted around each other’s like dancer’s arms, Joe stopped and looked at me, and asked me to marry him. There was no big speech, just a question, asked softly and carefully.

I didn’t know why I felt like the concrete statues around me, frozen and slightly damaged, why I couldn’t feel anything or say anything at all.