There’s nothing we do to earn something as unreasonable as moon dust, or death, or a high C you’re just born with.
When you have a skill that you don’t really want most of your life is spent pretending it doesn’t exist, in you, for sure, and in others, maybe also. The first thing I often tell people who find it unusual or exciting that I have an opera-trained soprano voice is that many people have the same, if not better, version of my vocal cords and lungs and tongue and everything else that goes into the bridge of “O Mio Babbino Caro.” Almost anyone, if you think about it in terms of statistics, could probably do the same, which makes the specificity and talent nonexistent. It happened to be me, but it could have been you.
I quit singing in a more dramatic fashion than I’d wanted, with a series of meetings between my voice teacher and my mom, and then my dad, and then my dad and my mom, and then just me. Did I really want to throw all this away? asked Dr. Ginger Beazley, who’d trained not one but two sopranos now singing in the Metropolitan Opera because of a weird loophole in a Seventh Day Adventist college in Huntsville, Alabama that allowed religious people to display their talents if and only if they swore they’d gotten all of them from God. I looked around at the exercise ball she’d taught me to breathe on and the painting of a cliff I sang into so I could picture my voice and sometimes myself being flung as far away from this room as possible and told her yes, and that was the last time I ever had to hit a high C, I thought, until someone my mom knew died, and I found out she’d promised them my voice.
There’s a lot of glamour in the life of a wedding singer, but the thing you get when you accidentally become a funeral singer is stability. Funerals for the elderly aren’t so much places of mourning as they are showrooms, as anyone with a particularly frank grandmother quickly finds out when she stuffs an embroidered cocktail napkin filled with crab pastries into your bag at the reception and tells you to hang on to both so you can get the same for hers. The old attend funerals the way savvy editors attend fashion week: performatively to pay their respect; discreetly in an attempt to find the next big thing. The summer after I quit opera, the elderly discovered my take on hymns, and without warning or fanfare, I was that thing.
The rush to lock me down started immediately. It doesn’t really matter, you find when you spend a lot of time with old people, how a person lived. What matters is the way their loved ones bothered to say goodbye. My own grandmothers seemed to battle it out for me, with the paternal one nudging me towards the end of every Sunday lunch, reminding me she’d been promised “Amazing Grace,” lest I ever, ever forget. My mother’s mother was more subtle, choosing instead to take me along to every single funeral she was invited to, always taking a moment in the receiving line to point out how much better my version of “Here I Am Lord” was than whichever musical theater reject her dear friend’s family had managed to pull together. As she aged her will to charm diminished, and at one friend’s particularly long-lasting ceremony she seemed to realize she finally had me in her pocket, ignoring the bulletin and flipping directly to the hymn she most wanted to hear when Jesus brought her home and loudly telling me so before the service began.
I was never paid, of course, and the number of requests vastly outweighed the number of times I actually made it home to mourn on key, but I did receive one gift, from my mom’s lifelong best friend, after a stirring Methodist favorite for her dad. He’d been an inventor, and one of his many patents had done something that helped something that at some point made it to the moon, and as a thank you he got a lot of earth money and one moon rock. That rock, his daughters had decided, was the symbol of him they wanted to keep most, so they pummeled it into dust and separated it into vials.
I didn’t know any of this when my mother handed me a box containing a necklace containing powder a few days after the funeral and asked me, beaming, if I knew what that was. Horrified that I’d be forced to wear the ashes of a man I’d never met for the rest of my foreseeable life if I intended to keep visiting home I held back a retch and said, “I think so.”
“It’s moon dust,” she said, and I breathed for the first time in tens of seconds.
For three years I hardly ever took it off, telling boys I met in bars and professors I wanted to impress that, did they know actually, that this was moon dust, dust from the moon, a rock from space, all crushed up, and I get to wear it, but it’s kind of a long story. It was more than enough for the bar crowd but mostly failed to meet the requirements of academia, and thus it ended up breaking one day not over a fascinating text or ground-breaking paper on events right here on earth, but a table filled with scraps of fabric and bow ties in the basement of a menswear store on Bond Street, where I was spending a semester away from school being belligerent around well-dressed thirty-somethings.
“I got moon dust all over the stock table,” I told the store’s manager, finally explaining that my necklace was a vial containing crushed up bits from space. “I don’t really know what to do with it.”
He leaned against the wooden desk brought in from somewhere else, arms folded like a man who had been here before, despite all odds in the universe as a whole suggesting he had not.
“You know what I would do if I was you? I’d snort it.”
And something about the way he was perched and the sense that it sounded like it made and the love that I had for snorting almost anything at this particular phase in my life made this suggestion feel like the most obvious thing in the world, so I went downstairs, and closed the door to the stockroom, and I snorted the remainder of the moon dust off the stock table at Billy Reid.
It was a placebo effect, I knew that right away, but it still felt good, as anyone could imagine, to snort up a rock from space. The closest thing to it I’ve ever heard of is the rock stars who snort up their dads, determined to preserve every fragment of masculinity about them, even the bits they came from. At that point in my life what I needed was a jolt, and moon dust felt safer and smarter and wiser than anything else I could try to jumpstart through my nose, but more than anything I did it because it immediately felt singular.
As far as I know, I’m the only human who’s ever snorted the moon, in any form, but I can’t imagine I’ll be the last. Months ago, woman in Chicago bought a bag of it for $995 and found out a week later it was worth $4 million—an impossibly hard equation to solve, the worth of the moon in earth dollars—but I wouldn’t fault her if she dipped into that fortune for a little jolt of her own. It’s nice, after all, to be one of the very few. There’s nothing we really do to earn something as unreasonable as moon dust, or death, or a high C you’re just born with, but that doesn’t necessarily mean, as I once thought with all forms of talent and fate, that you’re never allowed to let them be worth something to you. It’s nice to say what you want, and it’s even nicer to get it. We’re all made of star stuff, I know, but some of us have snorted moon stuff too, and there’s no real reason, I like to remind myself when I try to take another break from life to hang out with degenerates whose only real love is profoundly boring leather selection, to try to pretend we didn’t feel a little high.
Lily Puckett is a writer living in New York.
