I saw the total eclipse and now my life is falling apart.
Yesterday, April 8th, 2024 was a total solar eclipse event in the United States. We all know this—it just happened yesterday! Of course, the path of totality was not happening in Chicago (we’re only allowed 94% eclipse out here) but I wanted to see it, and a couple of friends also wanted to see it, so I hung out in the backseat of a friend’s car for several hours to get to an absolute nowhere place outside of Indianapolis in order to experience it.
And let me report that it was very cool! The sky got darker, the birds went away, the night bugs came out, and I had my eclipse glasses on to see the whole eclipse happen until it got to totality and then I could see the ring of truth with my own eyes. People clapped when the moon covered the sun, as people in a group are wont to do. I wanted to take a picture, but the moon started moving too fast for it to happen, and the world lit up again.
As far as eclipses go, we know what we’re seeing these days. But back in the times before we realized the world didn’t revolve around the Earth, but that the Earth actually revolves around the Sun, experiencing an eclipse must have been absolutely wild. While we consider it a marvel to be seen, they probably thought it was a bad omen—only something really evil (the Moon) can take away all the power of the Sun, right?
I’ve seen a partial eclipse before, in 2017, the last time a total solar eclipse happened in North America (though not in my neck of the woods because I am a chump). If you know anything about my life, you would know that 2017 to about now was pretty much the worst stretch of years that I have ever experienced. If an eclipse could put curses on people, I was one of those people that was cursed. But hey, we survived the curse, and you can’t get more cursed, right?
Well, ever since I saw the eclipse, things have been a little off. My acid reflux is less bad than it usually is, and that’s because I saw a total solar eclipse and not the fact that my dose of antibiotics just finished today. I made it back to the city right before improv class and I had a very good time, but that’s just the eclipse aliens taking over my body and removing my feeling of shame from my body. Today, I ate a really good sandwich.
Things are off. I have “679” by Fetty Wap stuck in my head, transporting me back to senior year of college, drunk off a funky monkey and at Smoking Dog, one of the worst places in all of Rock Island, Illinois. I am feeling fond of my senior year summer job working at a Girl Scout day camp. Back then I felt so free and so intoxicated without any consequences, except for the student loan debt I was accruing to make my life difficult just a year or two later.
We used to arrive at the club no earlier than at the stroke of midnight, and these days I feel like Cinderella having to leave the ball before the clock strikes or I will be left behind by my friends who are all splitting an Uber because it’s way past everyone’s bedtimes. These things did not bother me. I used to be the one who would disappear into the night, and reappear at 3:00 a.m. just in time for the last bus. It’s almost as if with the eclipse of 2017 all the energy to be my former self disappeared in a poof, never to return until the next total solar eclipse of 2024. There was a void of fun for so many years in my twenties and now I’m making it everybody’s problem.
Sometimes solar events birth a man-eating houseplant and sometimes they awaken a dormant monster within an almost 30-year woman who is nefariously horny and remembers a time when Drake was actually good. As the kids say these days, we are so back.