Creative Writing: Horsehead Nebula

Maroon and cerulean mingle in a vast obsidian pool. The oily swirls of a foreign drop slip and slime away in rippling circles. In the colors contorting around reflected light...rainbow after rainbow spreads. Scarlet burgeons from burgundy and emerald emerges topaz as chemicals dance on the surface of the water. Peach-colored veins drift out of the marbling chaos and away to the edges of the water. Combinations and rejections churn in orbs on the inky surface. This we pass in puddles on the street. The greasy filth that oozes from our cars creates something both gorgeous and suffocating. We notice neither, passing up the chance to wonder whether God’s size means that He sees nebulas as small as we see our slick roadway puddles.
Think of the
The edges of the phenomenon tremble like the awe rippling in our hearts as we collect picture after picture of this wonderful thing. Or Horsehead Nebula, hiding between the three stars of Orion’s belt. The dark mass we imagine as an equine head looms in giant, stringy puffs between wings spread like a crimson stretch of aurora borealis. The Phoenix Nebula seems like a more deserving name, but either way we’re telling our tiny stories to a realm much bigger than we could ever grasp. Education tells us that these formations are collections of fumes and particles, but our souls feel something else. The idea remains that the debris clouding the lens of outer space is not the all-and-everything of the nebulas we see. It is great. It is an intangible thing that we call illuminated gas and dust, and we know we don’t mean it, but we don’t understand what else to call it. We’ve
The metallic, corrosive liquid clashes with the wet as a slow ooze of violet and green coats the surfaces of the puddles. Bacterial life is choked out, left without air as the oil creates a seal quarantining the remaining oxygen inside. Each of these morbid puddles contain toxic water. Nebulas are the conglomerations of dust and debris left floating away from the collapsed orbits of dead stars. Somehow, these drifting particles come together into a breath-taking formation shining and sparkling for millenia. We bring our childhood tradition of naming cloud shapes to these wonders like the Crab Nebula, the Mystic Mountain, and The Eagle Has Risen. Even with reading all the knowledge we have assembled about puddles and star corpses, this is the essentials of what we know to be true. Death brought both of these into existence. We cannot look to death for meaning, because it is the end of something. Rather, we have to look at what died, and who created it, to see what meaning can be understood. Say a glassblower makes a vase and sells it. In the new owner’s home, the glass breaks on the floor beneath a window. When the sun’s rays shine through the window and illuminate the shards, filling the room with multi-colored veins of light, we may study the shards to see what they once were, but we know that these shards mean that something was lost. We try to find the creator of