The Large Hadron Collider

Those were the ice-age years - when I was hemmed in by concrete and nihilism. I tapped the books on my bedside table four times before bed, and didn’t look at the sky in case it caved inwards. I wore the same white Levi’s with pajama pants underneath, and ate tangerines with the peel still on.

I was safe within the womb of high school, but in a few months I would be birthed against my will into unstructured hours and left to fend for myself. Life was stripped back bare, revealing some sort of truth, like when the flesh rots from a body and all that remains are the teeth.

I went into my high school’s physics department, asking about the top quark and dark matter. I choked on what I couldn’t understand and was looked at like I was on the brink of collapse. Their expression reminded me of my father’s. Every time he opened his mouth, I cut myself against his teeth and tone. He communicated mostly through slamming doors and playing loud music he knew I hated—the kind that made my stomach drop the way it used to on fairground rides. The sound anchored an image I couldn’t shift: gravity slipping away, the world descending into annihilation. I hugged my knees, as I would someone I could have loved, and thought about what it all meant.

*

My mom drove me into school on her way to work. My head always felt too heavy for the stem of my neck those mornings. It lulled against the headrest and I was submerged in that delicious place between wake and sleep. “You’re fucked,” she said. She saw me then as half-stunned, and the only way to bring me back was to slap me back into consciousness. What she didn’t see was that I was seventeen and on fire, obsessed with the Higgs boson and not much else.

Back then dignity was drenched by apathy — frail and disintegrating gradually at the edges. A girl in my photography class thought I was homeless, but it didn’t bother me; in retrospect, it should have. It would do now, but then this image of the earth pulling apart at my feet and me vanishing with it was embedded. I went back and forth between home and high school. The walls held me together. Without them I would have pooled on the floor.

I saw a girl outside the prison compound of our town. She looked raw in the way I craved desperately for myself, the way I had been years before I went dormant. She claimed me at first sight — running to me, frenetic and unbound. Dark hair. That’s the first thing I saw. Lots of it. I loved her crooked nose and golden eyes. There was something soft about her, kind of maternal. That’s gone now. It’s been replaced by the desperation to soak up the remains of youth and expel any signs of time on her skin. Her name was Alissa, and Alissa sucked the colour out of life. Like me, if there was no certainty, she didn’t want it. Alissa kept me close because I trotted after her like a lamb seeking shelter, and I liked her because I could pretend she gave it to me.

During midwinter we dragged ourselves to our school’s indoor pool. Alissa’s expression melted into something like concrete. It was self-righteous — no amount of sincerity could penetrate that look. When it was directed at me, it was the equivalent of one dog circling another, about to force it down onto its back in submission. She could do that with such ease to whoever, whenever. Whether it was met with retaliation was another thing. For me, like with everything, I simply surrendered.

I saw her shape beneath the water before she began to struggle. Alissa opened her mouth, letting her body be filled. Air was precious to her in those moments. She gasped before using me as leverage, plunging me down. Air became precious for me as well, and I wondered if this is what it would feel like to run out of it. I wondered when our planet would run out of it.

On the poolside she asked, “Why would you even choose to take photography as a class?” All I could focus on was that dark hair dripping wet, still drenched in chlorine. The stale air of the indoor pool and rust down the sides evoked that sick desperation to escape. I wanted to get out of my body and this place, but at the same time it was still my ivory tower. I think I knew even then Alissa made an effort to strike at people when they revealed the soft flesh of their inner wrists. She plastered arrogance poorly over insecurity. She said photography was a stupid thing to pick. That I would leave with an empty qualification. I wanted to say they didn’t care about the qualification — just the grade. But I knew that went against Alissa’s philosophy, and I refused to be cruel.

I missed the darkroom now — the sulfur smell and hum of a ventilator. I would always grimace before stepping behind that curtain, anticipating the gush of freezing air, dunking my hands beneath the cold tap, and rinsing the remaining chemicals from the paper. We were all bathed in darkness except for the red safelight. A girl and a boy I didn’t really like flirted, and I was unfairly caught in their crossfire. I wanted that — to be in the air of someone else for a while, distracted by warm skin, eyelashes, and hands. They collided into me, scooped up photographic fix in their palms, and splashed each other with an aggressiveness I couldn’t correlate with affection. In there, I felt the hierarchy of high school slip away and the sweetness of anonymity creep in. I screamed in their faces because to me it was all just flesh, chemicals, and cold. My Levi’s reeked of fix forever after that day. But all I was concerned about was whether the acid they splashed was now burning my insides.

*

The heat of summer began to drive me mad. I had been living like I was confined to an iron lung for eight months. The white Levi’s which reeked of fix had been taken off and replaced with blue ones. They fit, but I still craved something light and airy. Fuck, why could I never be satisfied with what I had? My hair frizzed and my skin blistered. I still worried about the universe, but at least I never thought about my body. That was how it had to be — one in exchange for the other.

Alissa inhaled her vape and let it lie there dormant behind her lips. I envied how she could exhale in a way I knew didn’t hurt. As I fell asleep, my chest would ache and flutter. She would press a cold foot against my calf and hiss at me to keep still. I would whisper in return that I thought I was dying. Alissa would sit up, press her fingers to my pulse, then kiss the tip of my nose.

*
We stopped at seven somewhere in Detroit. It was May, evening basking golden and warm in its final glory. Homes were devoid of life and being feasted on by horse-weed. Growth should be tamed and trimmed like the front lawns on my street, not left to its own device, free to suffocate what we had built. Life trickled away, and on some, only the initial structure remained. I knew then that if I had been well and distracted, I wouldn’t have felt any of the sweetness. I wouldn’t have felt how the drive had been like watching a fruit bowl gradually be overcome by mold — each piece shrivelling, consumed by decay. I had known months before we arrived that it was all temporary — and that was what I feared most. The light, the scent in the air, the fact it used to be a stable powerhouse of efficiency. Now it was stripped bare on its back, tongue hanging out and waiting for the last blow.

I formed half a sentence asking what the point was, but dropped it when I saw a pharmacy — its roof sunken in like a rotten skull. We went inside — I worried about asbestos, and Alissa worried about the speed at which her leg hair would grow back. She asked me if it was true — that once shaved it returns darker and thicker. I said I didn’t know, and she reassured me it was alright to care about these things.

Alissa wanted to find a diner or a bar — somewhere we could go where there would be men and bland food. I wanted to stay put until it got dark and sleep in the car. I would touch each wheel four times so that we wouldn’t be murdered in the night or crash the next day. Alissa would say thank you while she folded my sweater to use as a pillow. And if I touched them five times instead of four, she would snap and tell me to stop giving her that “bell jar shit” - but she would still always let me finish.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, built by CERN in a 27-km ring under the Franco-Swiss border to collide particles at near light speed. It enables physicists to study fundamental particles, confirming the Higgs Boson in 2012.