By Elisa Penha

There’s a rabbit on the face of the moon. 

Well—the shape of a rabbit mapped out along the craters. It’s a rabbit in the same shitty way that constellations are bears or men with bows and quivers. I wonder about who must have been staring at the moon for long enough to have realized it sort of does look like a rabbit when you crane your neck, squint, and trace the lines with your finger in the sky. I wonder what their friends must have said when they told them: there’s a rabbit on the face of the moon. I wonder if they knew that their rabbit-moon would make it into my sixth-grade astronomy class, a millennia later, while I sat in a plastic chair and watched the projector screen. At first, I didn’t really see it. But then my science teacher took out a red marker and outlined the rabbit, and then I saw it for certain. There’s a rabbit on the face of the moon. I’m sure of it, now. 

I don’t think I’m significant. But I don’t think I’m without significance. I think the former has more to do with a supposed grand-scheme of things, and the latter with my own scheme of things. I am with significance when I am overly polite to retail workers in bookstores. I will be significant when some throwaway observation I once made about the universe reaches rabbit-moon status. Do you see the difference? Maybe not—it’s pretty arbitrary, anyway. It’s only a difference under the assumption time is linear. Or that there is a grand scheme of things whatsoever. If I’m being honest, I don’t think there is, but it isn’t in a nihilistic way. Quite the opposite. I think this is the grand scheme of things. That every time you run up stairs two at a time or accidentally blow on cold food before you realize it doesn’t need to be cooled down is the grand scheme of things. 

Though I do not mean to be coy. I understand what people mean when referring to said ‘grand scheme’—an everlasting memory. The idea that some actions shall be important to the unknown predetermined fate of the universe. In a humanistic sense, the grand scheme of things means the Apocalypse—in whatever incarnation you please, whether it be Biblical or Ragnarok. The idea that we are on an inevitable collision course towards something bigger than ourselves, and that only those with a higher purpose will be spared in order to play a part. It’s hopeless because none of us have a higher purpose. None of us are the once and future king, and none of us discovered the rabbit-moon. And so we despair. I despair. Because no fawning over how much I do not believe in determinism will make it so I am okay with not mattering at all. Because I want to matter. Because we all do. 

I think I’m thinking too big. I think I need to dial it back. How can I not matter, when I write my name on the front page of every book I buy? How can I not matter when the fluorescent map in the shopping mall shows me a big arrow and points to the hallway where I stand and says you are here? When I’m the only one waiting at a bus stop, and therefore the only reason the bus pulls to a stop? I did that. I existed there, and I stood there, and my existence was seen and acknowledged and acted upon, and now I’m on a bus, and I took fifteen seconds out of everybody’s life while they waited for me to board the bus, and now I am irreversibly a part of twenty more lives than I was a minute ago. I am a butterfly effect. I am a mathematical error. I am an unforeseen consequence of the explosion of stars. I am matter and I matter. 

There’s a spot underneath a particular tree on the field of my old middle school where I was sitting when I finished reading the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time. I thought about how I was probably the first to ever do that; to finish the Chronicles of Narnia for the first time underneath that particular tree on that particular field. I thought that made me kind of a legend—a pioneer. I stuck my legs out and laid down in a starfish position underneath the tree, with my copy of the final Narnia book—The Last Battle—to my left, and thought about how now, I was the first ever to do that; to lay down in a starfish position next to The Last Battle underneath that particular tree on that particular field. And so on. And so I continued to be a trailblazer of unique circumstances. But that evening, I thought of how I might have—and probably was—not only the first to do any of that, but the last. That I’d stumbled upon a sequence of totally distinctive moments that were now seared into the fabric of time without causation. I think that nobody should have that sort of power, and yet all of us do. 

I think that we all have some sort of terrifying, incomprehensible, ungraspable power in regard to how we are able to shape existence. Be it meaningless discoveries or global unravelings of scientific revolutions that topple churches and tectonic plates. And—most of all—the never-to-be-repeated actions of a human merely going about their deafeningly real and purposeful life. 

I guess I don’t really know anything. But I do know that there is a rabbit on the face of the moon. Next time it’s clear enough outside—next time you see the full moon in bright white bloom in the sky—try to find it. Say hi to the millions and millions and millions of people who have looked for the rabbit on the face of the moon before. Who knows? Maybe one of them will say hi back.