I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go

~ Live & Learn

I’ve been getting text messages from the moon. A note flashes on my phone, asking if the moon can track my location, and I consent.

I have moved to a new city but the moon is following me around. It texts to tell me when it will be out. Through the windows, there is just a parallelogram of sky at the top of the courtyard, only a small space to catch the passing moon on certain clear nights…

The app uses my location to tell me the moon’s phase, direction, distance at all times. Right now, the moon is 384,012 miles away from my hand, which is holding my phone close to my heart, as I sit at the table in the narrow kitchen of this flat with tall windows in an old-style apartment block, stinging nettles by the front door. I’m just home from work, vibrating with tiredness. The moon is waxing gibbous and is 25.2 degrees above the horizon, almost due east. It rose just after midday and will set around 3 a.m…

The internet is hectic and I go to the moon to relax, opening new browser tabs for the moon’s Wikipedia page and Google Maps of its surface. I follow new lunar developments from NASA. I learn that the moon was probably once part of the earth, sheared off by an asteroid. B, who moved from Scotland to Tasmania, tells me that there is a different moon in the southern hemisphere: it waxes and wanes in the opposite direction. I learn that the moon is slowing down the earth’s rotation. The moon is holding on to us…

I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go…

The lunar cycles are almost all I have in my diary for the year. My future is blank but I know what the moon will be doing…

People in this town can’t commit to anything, but the moon is always orbiting and the months pass relentlessly. I don’t speak the language but I know ‘der Mond’. My attachment to the moon grew during the years I’ve been lonely and so did the moon’s attachment to me. The moon, I tell B, is my boyfriend.

— Amy Liptrot, from her Prologue titled “February Hunger Moon” in The Instant (Canongate Books, March 3, 2022)

Notes:

  • Waning Crescent Moon (25%). DK @ Cove Island Park, 37° F. 5:33 a.m. Sunday, March 27, 2022. More Photos from this morning here.
  • Book Review of “The Instant” in The Guardian

27 thoughts on “I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go”

  6. How wonderful that you bring this up this morning! I watch the sky with love and wonder–last night the stars came out incridibly brightly…and that is after a moody day of rain and then bright sun and then moody darkness…and on and on. That is why I found it hard to believe how bright the stars were last night. But, I could not find the moon! Was it there? Someone here in the Central Northeast might know… What happened to her? Was she hiding?

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  8. I receive an email about 5-8 times a month from NASA…I rec’d bright & early in my email on 3/21/22 …then…on Monday evening the 21st of March (dark out) I didn’t feel like going outside into the courtyard so I went to the east side of my house and opened the bathroom window to gaze…waiting in anticipation…any minute now…and on cue there she is, super bright and low, traveling in Orbit between the Earth and the Moon…the temporary home of astronauts from several countries…I always wonder what it must be like to be closer to the Moon and how majestic it must be to see with your eyes, so up close…the magnitude, the brilliance and the topographical features of the surface of the Moon…I have no doubt that one or more of those astronauts on the International Space Station, have been patched through to home and been able to read to their child or children “Good Night Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown…while they’re are passing by the Moon…my email heading is Spot the Space Station from NASA.gov if any of you want to google to find out how to sign up to receive the email for your location! // PS: love your photo!

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  9. How do you subscribe to see NASA photos? I just get notification to watch the Space Station Fly over! Photos would be great…I read this earlier today:
    The space agency is expected to announce an intriguing new discovery made using the Hubble Space Telescope.
    Hubble has made a lot of new discoveries over its 32 years in operation and even now, despite being more than three decades old, it is still managing to find exciting new things.

    According to NASA, the telescope’s latest discovery will be revealed to the public on March 31st at 11am EDT.
    As things stand, we don’t know what the discovery could be, however NASA itself has described it as “record-breaking” and suggests that it will open up a whole new area of study.

    “Hubble has dazzled humanity for more than three decades with its iconc images of the cosmos,” the press release reads.

    “For nearly 32 years, Hubble’s groundbreaking discoveries have rewritten textbooks and reshaped our understanding of the universe. This latest Hubble result not only extends our understanding of the universe, but creates an exciting area of research for Hubble’s future work with NASA’s newly-launched James Webb Space Telescope.”

    Source: NASA

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