Jami Nakamura Lin
1. THE DISPATCHBlack Holes Primp and Mourn the Stars
Some black holes love chewing. Love that full-body crunch. How it starts in the molars and lights down to your toes.
Other black holes love swallowing. Love not feeling a thing as it goes down. Love plausible deniability and a throat unscratched.
Some black holes are formed the second a star dies. Boom, death, boom, birth. You could call this reincarnation or you could call it gentrification or you could call it making do.
Some black holes exist, and some black holes don’t exist, and the ones that don’t and the ones that do are often the same black holes, depending on which scientist is talking.
Some black holes want. Some black holes only want, and this wanting—the all-encompassing nature of it—frightens the surrounding interstellar dust. Frightens the black holes themselves.
Other black holes do not want at all. They are content to just chill at the center of their galaxies until the end of time. If they get antsy, they count the supernovae until they can relax again: Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Perseus, Indus, Draco… These black holes have a high threshold for boredom.
Some black holes have good boundaries. They have a well-distinguished event horizon, the line that demarcates the space where you can no longer escape their gravity. The problem is that sometimes you don’t know it’s the event horizon until you’ve crossed it.
Some black holes give you the heebie-jeebies just to think of them—this place of no return. What even are they? What do they mean? Everything in the universe is balanced so precariously.
You can’t look at a black hole, but you can’t look away, either.
Some black holes hide in the deepest pockets of their galaxies. Some black holes allow themselves to be occasionally recorded. They want fame as much as they abhor it. (Don’t perceive me— perceive me.)
Other black holes wait their entire lives for the Hubble to come by. They beautify themselves in anticipation, plumping the gas in their accretion disks and brushing silver shadow on their voids. You can tell that these black holes mourn the stars they once were. They remember light. They remember what it was to be looked at. They remember little children gazing up with plastic binoculars, couples alone pointing up at them before tonguing each other’s mouths. They remember being wished upon.
Other black holes don’t remember the past. Or if they do, they pretend they do not. What is the point of remembering, these black holes wonder—in space no one can hear you dream.
* * *
Some black holes can deform spacetime. Some do it because they were born to do it, though they try not to, and have to debrief afterwards with their therapists. Others do it just because they can.
Some black holes vehemently argue that they do not suck up everything around them. They call this an egregious simplification. They wait eagerly for an example of human spaghettification. Other black holes blanch at it. But mostly they do not think of humans at all.
Some black holes don’t argue with sucking narrative because they just want to be left alone. Other black holes don’t argue with the narrative because they know the narrative is true, or because they are just tired. The biggest black holes can last for a googol years. This is a long time to be alive.
Some black holes wander through the Carina-Sagittarius spiral arm and ask is anybody here?
Some black holes get mad about being reduced to a metaphor. Take me as I am, they say. Other black holes are just glad to get a mention. How lonely it can be.
Some black holes have always known who and what they are. Their ancestors prepared them long long ago. These black holes can tell you about escape velocities, singularities, the ways in which they alter the normal laws of physics. They know the cyclical nature of the world. They remember radiating, and they remember no longer radiating. Dust into dust.
Other black holes have endured millennia after millennia in ignorance, staring out into the cosmos without looking at themselves. They learn their nature only when they begin to trace the negative space. It is too late. They understand they exist only after everything else has disappeared.
—After Meredith Alling
2. BUREAU INVENTORYMy bed, the only place I write
The unfortunately named “husband pillow” that supports my back and arms while I write in bed
Pilot Vball pens, probably leaking ink everywhere (an even smoother writing experience than the G2 series!)
Supernote, an alternative to the ReMarkable that doesn’t use a subscription service and allows the Kindle app for my library books
Full stick Post-its, which I use to map out essays and ideas in my notebooks
3. BIOGRAPHYJami Nakamura Lin is the author of the illustrated speculative memoir The Night Parade (Mariner/HarperCollins and Scribe UK, 2023). A Catapult columnist, she has been published in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, What God is Honored Here? (U. Minnesota Press) and other publications. She has received support from organizations including the National Endowment of the Arts/Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, We Need Diverse Books, Yaddo, and Sewanee.