Wild Write - spinning in my daily circles

All of us and everything already there. The table set.
Candles, lit tapers, dark glowy corners.
The menu a surprise.
The guest list of invitees streaming in, mingling, letting each other know “It’s so good to see you!” in exclamations as they raise champagne flutes, the bubbles effervescent + gleaning, floating in tiny streams and popping in the air.
Tiny stars of gas, mimicking the brightest stars hung in the sky,
a glistening patchwork of memories and time.
If I stare too long at them, if I start thinking about how
I am but one bubble on the side of the Earth’s
spinning champagne glass,
I feel dizzy. Faint. The vastness threatens the
corners of my eyesight, burning my vision.
My daughter wants to talk about space often -
the sun, the moon, the planets, the planets’ moons.
And I sometimes need to catch my breath and tell her,
”Mama needs a break,” and she understands
because I tell her it all makes me feel uncomfortable and queasy
like when I talk to her about blood and muscles and bones.
”Like when you hear people chewing ice,” she adds, and yes,
the cringing physical thrumming response, but also,
Space is just beyond me.
I am nothing to it.
To me it is so empty. So dominating. So dark.
And yet -
all of us and everything already there,
whether I like it
or not,
spinning in my daily circles,
held aloft by the Earth’s core.

*the wild writing line my writing partner and I used - all of us and everything already there - is from Rebecca Elson’s Antidotes to Fear of Death