Fun fact: I’ve heard Pluto used to be a whole lot bigger. I’ve heard Pluto used to be an Earth-sized planet; used to be Planet X; used to pull the planet Neptune from its perfect ellipse and generally cause a whole lot of grief to the other planets who thought it was a little bit tiresome to have to revise their astronomy textbooks. When Clyde – that’s the man who discovered Pluto, his name was Clyde – when my friend Clyde discovered Pluto he ended up in the newspaper but he didn’t even hear about it because he was still up in the observatory. Colds hands. Cold feet. He probably would have gotten frostbite but his mum helped him pack and Mrs Tombaugh always packed for every season.
The thing about Pluto, though, is that it’s very shiny. It’s all that ice. It’s all that fresh solar breeze at the dark edges of space. It’s even colder than an observatory. The thing about Pluto is that it has a moon called Charon. It took them a while to find Charon of course because it wouldn’t sit still, it kept spinning around, and if a planet is moving, everyone knows, you can’t shift the telescope lens fast enough to see it. Clyde – my friend Clyde, you may have heard of him – he spied Pluto and Charon all those years ago and he didn’t even know it. He thought it was an Earth-sized planet; thought it was Planet X. But the thing about Charon, though, is that it’s very shiny. The ice. It’s all that ice. No global warming on Charon. No burning coal. Charon and Pluto are so large that one doesn’t orbit the other. They orbit a centre of mass, in the void but defined by their pull on one another.
I met someone. I was like my friend Clyde (you may have heard of him), waiting in the observatory, and it was very cold, but I was looking at the stars when I walked into someone and I fell down on my back and she laid down beside me. We laid a while at the edge of the abyss and I told her a story of poem I’d written which wasn’t very good but made me feel good writing it. She said she couldn’t see the stars from her flat and I told her a fun fact I knew about Pluto. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s the missing metaphor. Is that what we looked like, up on the hill? My chest was sore. My heart was dancing in my ears. I don’t know what this is. It could be gravity. Is this what gravity feels like? There’s music only I can hear. There’s a warmth to everything I touch. It could be orbit, our orbit, not the Moon to the Earth but a likewise pair, destined to drift around the sun in each other’s embrace. I thought my life was always going to be the way it was. And then they discovered Charon.
Callum Methven is a writer and translator living and working on unceded Wurundjeri land, in rural Victoria. His writing has appeared in Verge and Signs of Life Anthology and in 2022 he was longlisted for the Richell Prize.