And at my misunderstanding of the exhibit, I still remember now, as if slowed to standstill or shrunk to a diorama - a scene to be walked about and the characters directed to behave - I still remember those few seconds it took Sarah, smiling, to up on her tiptoes and clasp me on the shoulders as instruction to remain, taking three paces back to demonstrate - wind-milling her arms about like a child missing her sparkler, or a conductor her baton - that Earth’s great exodus from origin represented thus: A huge sequence of ellipses through space and time. Solar system, galaxy, galaxy clusters, until - no matter the omnipotence of the geometrist - it could appear no more like maths than it could the flight of a drunk bumble bee.
Round and around me in the middle. Our planet’s skewed axis demonstrated by dint of an affected deportment: A lopsided shuffle she augmented with The Bells! The Bells! and that threatened to topple us together - that I might catch her - every time her smooth brown arms stretched into the air to demonstrate colliding comets; her poise unsettled.
Now nearing a third full circuit, she raised her hand for the last time, and motioned collision course with another heavenly body, held in the hollow of her upturned hip, bringing one fist down to the other over her strap-off-shoulder, smashing the planet slow-motion into a gently opening palm that she left there at her waist, smiling. Invitation to hold.
And she thanked me - coming in closer - for my part in the demonstration: The singularity about which she’d moved for a while.
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