How You Like Me Baby, by Ghostface Killah
I’ll start at the beginning. Valeria and I met years ago because my Uncle Thomas and her father Hugo worked at the same restaurant in Brooklyn, NY. When my first wife and I moved to DC, Valeria was already living there working for the Smithsonian. Maybe it goes without saying, but Valeria is a bona fide genius. She came to the US from Colombia and attended high school in Brooklyn for a year before she graduated at fifteen. She got her bachelors degree from Columbia about three years later and then she moved to DC to attend Johns Hopkins where she got a masters degree in Applied Physics. She also did some work in Astronomy that led to her current position at the PARI where she deciphers telemetry that I wouldn’t even be able to identify as useful information. The PARI is an amazing place, and don’t tell anyone, but Valeria and I made love for the first time there under all of the stars; I don’t want her to get fired or anything.
Its amazing what the sky looks like in a place like Rosman, NC where there aren’t many residential or commercial buildings, and the observatory is free of light pollution. There are so many spots of light in the night sky, and some seem clustered in a haze or smoke, revealing a sort of design or at least one that emerges if it is all random or merely the result of physical processes playing themselves out worlds away. We fit, Valeria and I, in that moment we were part of the far away constellations, our bodies probably shown resplendent on the blanket and when we melded into one another, our light together was brighter than a sun. And that is where we started.
I wanted to propose to her afterwards when I drove her to her house and we enjoyed the dark mountain scenery through the windows. The clouds had moved in and the dark seemed to seize and retreat under rocks and trees when my headlights pierced the night. The dark was like a tangible thing; black milk, or black silk fabric with depth as silky as the surface and it scurried away from the light as fast as it approached. Valeria loved it.
“If light is energy charged by photons, then darkness is energy too, charged by whatever particles we’ve yet to discover.”
She talks like that when she gets lost in the wonder of nature and as I drove, she relaxed with her head on the headrest, looking past me through my window.
“You’ve felt it? Standing in still darkness, surrounded by it and you can’t see your own hand inches from your face. Maybe its a mental thing, but its like moving through water right? But much less pressure, its what it feels like to swim on the moon I imagine.”
She’s so dreamy, in ways that I can never be.
Back at her place that night, we did it again, and I’m not bragging, I only mention it because its when I discovered her love of rap music. She was in her early twenties then and the home that she rented was decorated like a college dorm room; she had bright, neon rugs and pillows, wooden bookshelves full of science and mathematics textbooks, and in her bedroom she had posters of the boys she loved. I smiled to see a lot of dark faces; Michael B. Jordan, Derrick Rose, and to my surprise, Mr. Dennis Cole, aka Ghostface Killah. It was obvious that he was her favorite, she had a collage of his album covers on one wall and she looked slightly embarrassed.
“Im a big fan of his rhymes,” she said, really hitting that R, and she put on music, and then we shown really brightly together a couple of times.
PRL Serials 