Magonia(7)

Because sometimes I find myself doing things I “know” better than to be doing, but that doesn’t stop me. The activities in the corners of my brain call to me, and they’re strong. On a daily basis, I have to actively not think of them, if I want to retain focus.
In eighth grade, I lost vigilance, and an hour later, I’d turned my copy of Grapes of Wrath into a circus of a hundred and thirty-four origami animals, ostriches and elephants, train cars with actual wheels, acrobats.
There was a bad period in third grade when it was all I could do to leave the aquarium alone. I kept feeling sure the fish were looking at me. And then again in sixth, when my classroom had a canary. That time, I swear, it did talk to me. Not in words. It just sat on its perch, staring hard at me and singing, incredibly loudly, so loudly that it actually had to be moved to another class, because it disturbed everyone.
Birds. I’ve never not had trouble with birds. I’m the person who gets dive-bombed by whatever’s flying by. I wear hats when I’m outside.
Anyway, principal’s office.
Aza: “I saw something weird in the sky.”
Aza’s Dad: “I apologize for my daughter. Her medication—”

Aza (disliking hallucination implications): “No, you’re right. I got bored. So I made it up. Leave it.”
Principal (eyeballing to see if he’s being mocked): “Just no more, Ms. Ray. No more of your antics.”
Antics is pronounced like a dirty word.
Upon extrication from the principal’s office, I pressed my face to the window in the stairwell to try to see whatever it was I’d seen before. But no, nothing. It was gone.
Now my dad looks exhausted. He cooked. Tonight, some sort of noodle casserole with desperation sauce. Peanut butter involvement. He swears it’s legitimate Thai, but there’s no macaroni in Thai food. Nor jerky. I’m pretty sure there’s jerky in there.
“She did see something,” my dad tells my mom.
My mom looks at my dad, who regularly gets into trouble for believing things that defy logic. He’s a passionate imaginer. My mom and Eli are the house realists. My dad finally shrugs and turns back to the stove.
“She hallucinated something,” my mom says. “Not saw.”
“She has a vivid imagination,” Eli says, and snickers at the stupid phrase, which has been used on me for as long as I can remember.
“Whatever,” I say. “It’s over. Leave it.”
I’ve already been out again, staring up at the sky—which is dark, plus a skinny slice of moon—and there’s nothing whatsoever unreasonable about it. It’s just itself, the sky, and there, the North Star.
I like the sky. It’s rational to me in a way that life isn’t. Looking at it doesn’t suck the way you might think it would, given all the dying-girl-stares-at-heaven possibilities. I don’t think of the sky as any kind of heaven item. I think of it as a bunch of gases and faraway echoes of things that used to be on fire.
The proper name for the North Star is Cynosure, named after a nymph. It’s a scip steorra, “ship star,” for navigation. In some of the old stories (give it up for the many peculiar and awesome philosophers of the 1600s—in this case, Jacques Gaffarel, and no, I can’t explain how I happened upon him, except that at some point, deep in the library, I saw a circular diagram of the sky, and the stars looked like breeding fruit flies in a petri dish, and I was So Obsessed), the patterns of the stars form letters. Celestial alphabets. Writing that gets rewritten as the earth moves. If you look at the sky that way, it’s this massive shifting poem, or maybe a letter, first written by one author, and then, when the earth moves, annotated by another. So I stare and stare until, one day, I can read it.
When I was little, I tried to sneak out at night to get my fill of the stars. I had a plan involving bedroom window, drainpipe, up instead of down. My mom busted me as I was dragging the blanket onto the shingles, but she surrendered and took me up at four in the morning, accompanied by all kinds of just-in-case breathing equipment. We looked at the sky together, wrapped in my comforter, with a thermos, a flashlight, and a book of constellations. We just sat there in silence, and periodically, my mom would show me one of the star pictures and explain its meaning.
So when I complain? I complain with this context. My parents are the kind of parents people wish they had. They had no problem setting up a lamp with a shade poked full of holes that project the entire Milky Way onto my bedroom ceiling when I turn the light on.
Imagine if you could see all the stars we can’t see anymore. If the lights all got turned off, all over the world, the sky would be blazing and crazy, the way my lamp makes it look.
I don’t know how to navigate by any of the stars, but I read once about someone who took on the entire ocean on a little handmade raft, from South America to Polynesia. The Kon-Tiki, his raft was called. He was a Norwegian explorer named Thor.
I kind of wish my name were Thor. It implies warrior-ness. But, no. Aza. Named after what? No one.
I didn’t even start out called Aza Ray. This is the name they gave me after the breathing problems started. Before that, I was called Heyward. (Heyward was a great-uncle. Eli is named after a great-uncle too. I’m not sure what’s wrong with my parents. Could they not name us after our aunts?)
I’m still Heyward on official forms, which, Tell Not a Soul. But—
Mom: “That day, after we thought we were going to lose you, we suddenly knew your name was Aza. You were meant to be named after the full spectrum, A to Z. It was perfect.”
Dad: “It just came to us. It was weirdly spiritual. We figured, who defies that?”