Heart in Pisces

The New York Times reports on a heart-shaped Mylar balloon stuck to the ceiling of Grand Central Station, its final resting place the belly of the constellation Pisces. Commuters share pictures of the heart: a blood-red drop in a sea-green expanse, puffy and metallic. Astrology has nothing to say about ‘Heart in Pisces,’ but hundreds of miles from NYC, I hatch my own wild mythologies. I was born face up and on the cusp, a Pisces teetering near Aquarius. My little star gazer mom had called me. This is the orientation of chronic dreamers. I can’t stop cranking my neck back, my eyes up up up, scouring for symbols above me to make sense of life in the dirt. Maybe this is why I get dizzy looking down, or harbor an irrational fear of caves and black holes, which I imagine, somehow, to always exist below me. The Times reports on these, too, the very next day. Scientists have discovered a cosmic neutrino, they say, rocketing through the Mediterranean Sea at near the speed of light. They think it could be proof of an exploded black hole. I’m terrified by the combustion of empty space, the thought of dark matter as shrapnel. A witchy friend tells me I’m so Pisces. Guilty a$ ¢harged. I want to divine the numinous from the mundane like water from a bone, but I can’t seem to make this heart-shaped balloon mean anything. Instead, I want it to do something—to stay buoyant into infinity. Maybe it will outlast Grand Central, the eventual collapse of marble and Guastavino tiling and fading Zodiac signs painted in gold. Maybe it will wind up up up, past Alrescha and Fumalsamkah and other stars that make up the actual constellation Pisces. The Times said the neutrino was believed to come from an exploded “tiny” black hole, which strikes me as more terrifying than the larger, run-of-the-mill variety. When I feel the threat of being extinguished at my toes, will this heart balloon carry me away from rogue subatomic particles and diminutive voids? I have to have hope for something that looks like love, pinned sideways, and shining against the night.

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