An Origin Story

I began in the basement, playing with the chemistry set, today's adventures in science creating tomorrow's America, beacons and purple fizzy liquids and the smell of rotten eggs, squeezing my eyes shut and wishing hard that I could create a new element, number 104! 105! something new on the bottom rows that would come into being by the compression and heat of forces that I couldn't comprehend, something unnatural, boy-made, plus puberty was coming and I wanted some orderly rows, a periodic table of lusts and mysteries, so I poured this powder into that liquid, surveyed sorrowfully the next day the half-inch of white crust at the bottom of the test tubes, the metal case basement-cold to my touch, the crew-cut boy on the front of the set already light-years ahead of me, nothing happening, little materializing but anti-epiphany: these ingredients don't mix, melancholy, 1+1=0.