Dueling Orbits Over I-76
On black holes, growing up, and finding your way home
In physics, escape velocity is the minimum speed needed for a free, non-propelled object to escape from the gravitational influence of a massive body, that is, to achieve an infinite distance from it. (Wikipedia)
A few nights before I moved to Pittsburgh for the first time, two friends from high school came over after dark, and we sprawled out on the flat-top roof above my garage. I laid out the big blue and white striped beach blanket my parents used to bring to summer concerts in the park, and got out the old telescope from the spare room only to find that it was missing a mirror. We set out to try and name the stars, but we were never ones for checking the weather, so we ended up naming our fears instead — I, moving across the state to a city full of strangers, and them, rooming together at a university close to our hometown. I only speak to one of those friends now, but that night, unable to see the stars for the clouds, I thought there was no distance wide enough in the universe to come between us.
The decision to go to school in Pittsburgh had been an obvious one, but at the age of 18 I agonized over my choice of university for months, all the way up through April of my senior year as the final rejection emails trickled in. On one afternoon I flicked on the upstairs TV to some childhood reruns and spread all of my college brochures and informational fliers across the carpet. I flipped through every single one and created lists of pros and cons in an old notebook, with the obvious choice staring up at me in blue and gold lettering — and when I finally decided on Pitt, no one in my life was surprised, least of all my dad, who’d been not-so-subtly hoping I’d go there since we first visited the campus the previous summer. It was decided — I would be cast out of home’s orbit come the end of August, and out of my closest group of friends at the time, I would be the only one.
As a person who always ran from big decisions, turning to run from everything I’d ever known was the hardest thing I’d ever done. On my first night at college, my RA found me standing in the middle of my room in my pajamas, eating a leftover Panera roll by the light of my desk lamp at 11 PM, with “Read My Mind” by The Killers playing on loop in my headphones. On the second night, I took my first shower in my freshman dorm, and it overflowed and nearly flooded the entire bathroom adjoining my cinderblock shoebox bedroom. I had moved in a week earlier than most of my floormates for marching band, so I spent that night frantically texting my RA and the few other residents I’d met and trying to contact maintenance. On the third night, I stayed up messaging my older sister on Facebook about every fear I’d ever had. I spent most of my freshman year by myself, going to class and meals by myself, following like a lost puppy behind people who would eventually become some of my closest friends. I was incredibly miserable, and yet somehow I was the happiest I’d ever been.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike runs 360 miles across the state, from the Ohio border in the west to the Delaware River in the east. It stretches between Philly and Pittsburgh like a lifeline, the path of least resistance between yesterday and tomorrow. I must have crossed it a thousand times — I could try to count it, but the number wouldn’t make a difference. What does make a difference is that I know the road from Valley Forge to New Stanton like I know the back of my own neck, which is to say I could never describe it from memory but I’ve spent enough time with it that it’s familiar from a number of different angles. I know that the Sideling Hill service plaza is where all the buses stop because it serves both sides of the highway, so it’s always crowded; I know that the Breezewood exit connects you to Baltimore and DC; and I know that my soul resides somewhere above it, suspended between the dueling orbits of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
According to astrophysics, the gravitational field of a black hole is so strong that not even light can escape from it. This boundary is called the event horizon, beyond which the escape velocity from the black hole is greater than the speed of light. To an outside observer, a black hole can never be seen. An object can never actually be seen crossing the event horizon; it will just seem to go more and more slowly and become more and more redshifted until it simply fades out of view. But the event horizon of a black hole is a theoretical boundary — if it were possible for someone to fall through an event horizon and survive, they would pass through it in a finite amount of time, and they wouldn’t see or feel anything different as they did so. But they would never make it back out.
My former high school will be stardust soon, once they get around to knocking it down. But when I was a teenager, we used to walk across the trolley tracks over lunch break during band camp to buy snacks at the ancient Wawa, the one that looks like every other Wawa built before they started putting gas stations in them. Before it was a Wawa it was a gas station, and before that was so long ago that nobody cares to remember. There’s the parking lot behind it, where the teens used to go to smoke before they got busted, where the middle school bike gang used to spend summer vacation, riding in circles on the hot pavement.
Saxer Avenue was always Springfield’s Main Street, or at least it felt that way when we were sixteen with ten dollars in lunch money from our parents’ wallets clutched tight in our sweaty palms. At first glance, it mostly hasn’t changed, but now every December they light a big Christmas tree outside the old schoolhouse, and every spring there’s a festival in the park beside the library. On some summer nights they close off the road, and the local restaurants set up tables and chairs out in the middle of the avenue for dinner under the broiling Pennsylvania sun. The empty storefronts have been remodeled by out-of-towners with hipster restaurants and modern bars. Where there were once unnavigable parking spots there are now patches of grass with skinny green trees that hug the crosswalks. The street is a palimpsest of itself, a compendium of years-old afterimages rather than something reborn; little changes in a day, but every few years the Earth shifts on its axis, unnoticed unless you choose to measure it.
The suburbs have a bad reputation, something that gets reinforced by edgy teen dramas and Arcade Fire albums. I don’t hate my hometown; Springfield is a quiet Philly suburb with good schools and good people and memories that I hold dear. It doesn’t feel like a prison, but it does feel like a place that I outgrew. When I visit, the person I have become is squeezed into the mold of my younger self, like a hermit crab that’s grown too big for its old shell.
When I left home, it was not out of animosity, but out of a need to prove that I could do it. My hometown is not an inescapable void, but its gravitational pull is strong. I could return any time I wanted. But if I didn’t leave then, I knew I never would. Like so many who came before me, I would get swallowed by suburbia, without ever realizing I’d passed the point of no return.
In September 2018, Pitt Football played Penn State at Heinz Field in the third of four yearly match-ups. As is typical for Pittsburgh, it rained all day, soaking through our uniforms long before kickoff. It was grey and dreary, and the first half of the game tore up the muddy field so bad that they didn’t let us or the Blue Band back on for halftime. But at pregame, we lined up in the back tunnels with excitement buzzing under our skin. The drum cadence started up with fervor, and the call came down from the front of the line to GO SLOW. When the drumline was out of the tunnel, their sound was lost to the crowd, swallowed by the shapeless roar, so we kept time by shouting counts; our electric energy carried calls from the front to the back like currents. We ran out of the tunnel with more caution than usual, taking careful steps to avoid slipping on the wet floor and crashing down the slope like navy blue dominoes. Clarinet held tight, I sucked in a deep breath and entered the fog.
The rain made it a Good Smoke Day, one where the fire extinguisher spray hung thick in the air instead of dissipating right away. For my first few steps out of the tunnel, there was only white smoke around me. When I broke through the cloud seconds later, the breath I had been holding got caught in my throat. The stadium was packed end to end with thousands of people. I couldn’t hear anything but the cacophony of discordant voices — some booing, some cheering. It was my sophomore year, but it was my first Good Smoke Day. We lost the game miserably and I ended the night with a puddle of water in the bottom of my backpack. But I stood out on the field that night and thought, “Oh god, I’m finally home.”
Until I was seven years old, we lived two doors down from the middle school in a two-story brick house with a breezeway and a carport. Our neighbors also had two daughters, a bit older than my sister and I, and one year I threw up in their bathroom during a summer barbecue. There was a chain-link fence that separated the school from their property and the street, and for patriotic holidays my neighbor would make an American flag by putting colored solo cups through the links. Then our neighbors on the opposite side sold their house to the school district, and the rest of us were soon given no choice but to follow. After a few years, they knocked all three houses down and put up an eco-friendly kindergarten that was designed to solve overcrowding but didn’t, and they replaced the old chain-link fence with black iron bars.
A friend of mine used to get mad at me for referring to my dorm room as “home”. For me, home is a malleable thing; it’s a feeling more than it has ever been a building, or even a place at large. Home is my apartment in the city of Pittsburgh. Home is my family’s house in Springfield. Home is driving twenty minutes to the only Krispy Kreme in Delco just for a free donut, or a large pineapple-and-bacon pizza from Vocelli when no one feels like cooking. It’s running out of the Heinz Field tunnel to a deafening crowd of thousands. It’s the repurposed stone bricks in the foundation of the Springfield Literacy Center with the commemorative plaque attached. It’s wherever I am and wherever I want to be, in the same breath.
Sometimes, my roommate and I like to sit around the computer and browse local house listings on Zillow. Often, we look at the multi-million-dollar McMansions we’d never want, let alone afford, or the condemned houses with crumbling foundations. But sometimes we dream a little, and we look at the three-bedroom houses with the little front porches and square backyards, and we think about what it would be like to live there. We imagine ourselves with full-time jobs that don’t make us want to die, and a mortgage cheaper than our monthly rent. I think about words like “forever” and “permanent” and all I see is a work of fiction. I imagine the decisions I’ll have to make in life, and every choice feels like a betrayal.
You can’t see the stars in Pittsburgh. The city lights blot out the night sky so much you’d think the stars didn’t exist if you stayed there your whole life. At 22 years old I have never properly been stargazing, unless you count the time my parents took us down to the beach for a meteor shower when I was a kid, and I was the only one to spot one because I had turned to face the other way out of boredom. Sometimes, I lament the fact that I live in a city, or that Pennsylvania is so disgustingly cloudy that I missed the appearance of Comet Neowise. But I don’t need to see the stars anymore to know that they’re there, or how far away they are. I did not see them that night on the roof. But they are the same stars, even if those old friends and I are not.
After we graduated high school, six of us spent a week in Wildwood and had the best and worst times of our lives. We climbed the Cape May lighthouse and searched for polished stones in the sand. We played through most of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. We got pizza from the same place at least three times and ate Kohr Bros soft serve on the boardwalk. But we also screamed at each other on the pier and in the alley and during games of multiplayer Super Mario. We broke the toilet and dropped boxes of cereal behind the washing machine. I woke up earlier than the others most mornings, and played solitaire at the kitchen table in the quiet, hoping to whatever higher powers there are that we’d be okay, that we still loved each other, that they wouldn’t forget me in six months.
We got up early one morning to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic, but we forgot to check the weather and woke up to a clouded sky. We went anyway, and we found a horseshoe crab on the beach and tried to save its life. We named him Ernie, and we left him there with the knowledge that not everything or everyone can be salvaged.
The first night, before the frayed edges of our relationships revealed themselves, we stood out by the lake and reveled in our newfound freedom. We looked at the stars and named the constellations, and I saw something beautiful and hopeful reflected in their image. I did not know any better. That week was not the end; I’m still good friends with a few of them. But some people are held to each other by gravity, others only by the weakest of threads.
They’re the same stars. I am not the same.
Escape velocity from Springfield consisted of a college acceptance letter and five hours on the PA Turnpike. But no matter how far away you get, the starting point never changes. The places we come from leave permanent traces on us, like stardust. And somehow, I always find my way back again — the gravitational pull of my hometown will always call to me, as both a promise and a threat. As an adult, I ask myself where I belong and what I want, and the answers aren’t any more obvious. But choosing gets easier. There is no meaning to forever; we reach our end in a finite amount of time, and until then try our best to make a life for ourselves, year by year. Home is a fickle thing, but we build it ourselves, orbiting whichever stars pull us close enough to call our own.
When I moved into my current apartment, it was a couple of weeks after my roommates. The night before, I lay awake in my childhood bedroom listening to “Read My Mind” by The Killers, and felt the years stretch out in front of and behind me, wide and raw like a gaping canyon. In the morning, my parents drove me across the state after four months of COVID-19 quarantine in our family home, and I bounded up the steps in front of the building bursting with excitement. My roommates got me a cake, vanilla with strawberry filling from Giant Eagle. The top was decorated with blue and yellow flowers. It said Welcome Home.
