Are You There, Carl? It's Me, Laura

You're still half-drunk the morning after watching Cosmos; you snooze again, and wake to the startling realization that you are madly in love with Carl Sagan. By you, I mean me, and by in love, I mean doe-eyed and prone to using words like "shucks".

There really is something simplistic and pure about a man who wonders, no, a man who ponders the cosmos. There's an inherent duality of character; to be into stars and space is very boyish, yet to make a living out of pondering—indeed, to become one of the foremost ponderers—is oh so attractive.

More Yoo-man than Hue-man.
The roots of this love lie purely in the Sagan speech. He talks very distinctively. [At what point do we tell Laura he's dead? Ah, fuck it, she's in her happy place. —Ed.] It often changes in pitch, interspersed with moments of bated breath. There's an awkward cadence to it, an innocence, slightly stressed (i.e. most people say the word human, "HUE-man" where Sagan prefers the ever so unique "YOO-man"), and he has a way of using the term "star-stuff" in ways I never thought possible. Star-stuff, my God I love star-stuff. Dude likes stars, and he so dearly wants you to love the stars as much as he that he makes sure that every single word he says isn't scary but is entirely logical, reasonable and awe-inspiring.

Good Sport
Carl is understanding, patient and kind. He travels in this brilliant "sci-fi" looking space craft that shows up in the universe as a rotating beam of light and seems to be composed of no more than a control panel of arbitrarily blinking lights and a big screen TV. But
Carl, that doll, goes along with it. He takes it so seriously. He sits down at this arbitrary control panel with a look of such stern concentration that you'd think he was performing open heart surgery. He's so into it, it seems like he's partaking of some sort of fantasy in which he really does have a spacecraft and really is finding the answers to all the questions that have been plaguing him, questions that are beyond most of the world but so real and so important to him... and because of him, to me.

There's just something about a guy with a spaceship.
Let this be more than a formal internet announcement of my love for Carl (the internet is a cosmos in itself). I find that there are themes to my love affair that transcend space time [though possibly obviate the possibility of nookie. Just sayin'. —Ed.], just as he does in the space ship. Across all relationships I believe it important to marvel at the other person for one reason or another, and if a space ship and the ability to transcend space-time isn't something to marvel at then I don't know what is.

{illustration by Austin Cho, with help from dinosaurs and maybe beer}