Bathtub Djinn

By Ryan Matera

The moon once had its own rotation. Used to swerve on its own axis at its own rate, glib to the presence of its primary (us) — keen on its independence. Keen on proving that just because it came from our flesh it is its own body. The greater earth has dragged, for hundreds of millions of years, all of the moon’s mass towards one pole, has maimed its rotation to naught. It still revolves around its axis — only, on our terms. It rotates at the same rate that it revolves; one heavy pole eternally trained on Earth, the other, the Dark Side, prohibited for eternity from seeing its primary.

The moon, too, drags on us. It ushers our mass, our tectonic plates, towards one pole — in the same way that it beckons tides it beckons land. The friction from this drag has slowed our day some thirty measurable hours, has changed our reality and continues to do so at a diminishing but non-zero rate. And one day we, too, will be top-heavy, will stop rotating altogether, will train one face to the moon, the other away, our two celestial bodies locked in this trance, revolving only by the allowance of the other.

And I struggle to make this meaningful. Not meaningful like incredible — it is that on its own, on the weight of its own factual merit. Not meaningful in illuminating our own experience — we have done this to a fault. We have reduced most of these striking revelations, which have arrived at an increasing pace in this enlightened era of precision and exploration, to make metaphors for our own narratives. What I mean to say is I…