Star Bodies

I spend a lot of time sprawled beneath the cover of the stars, hoping it will make me feel closer to them. I lay out in the field behind my house and press myself flat against the ground, fingers sifting through grass and dirt, searching for the earth’s pulse. Sometimes I think that if I dig my nails in hard enough for the soil to cake or if I look up with enough longing, it’ll spark something deep between my ribs. That feeling of the organs inside me coming together to fill the gaps the blood always sloshes through.

My aunts tell me I try too hard to make sense of everything. I’m too analytical, too fussy, spending too much time complicating the simple and seeking out sense in the illogical. Those are almost exact quotes from them, things they’ve been telling me since moving in with them a couple summers ago.

The problem, they say, is that the stars are things to be felt, not analyzed. And I’m much too prone to thinking and observing and reflecting. None of those are feeling things; they don’t come from the heart or the soul. I never learned how to use those parts of myself from my mother. She seemed to lack them, and thus the ability to pass them onto other people. I think if she had been more like her sisters, I wouldn’t have trouble being one of them now.

My aunts are a vastly different type of women, spiritual in the sense that they give their lives over to the earth and the stars. The world is a pulsing body of souls and stars, and they unearth the depths of it. I used to imagine that they could look at me and bleed out all the plasma in my heart. I remember coming to them at the edge of adolescence, feeling so small under the enormity of their coal dark eyes and spindly fingers. It scared me at first, before I realized that the stuff of my childish nightmares came more naturally to my family than anything else.

They all seem so powerful, Tia most of all. She keeps her voice soft when she speaks, her accent lilting vowels in a curved pattern. She still awes me with the depths of her spirit. There is so much to her, and it’s hard for me to understand how one person can be so full. It’s like there are small pockmarks at the heart of me, pulsing and gaping.

She’s outside with me tonight, leaning back on her hands, fingers lacing through the grass. The deep red paint on her nails makes slim pops of color against the faded green. She keeps her eyes closed when she points her face toward the moon, the light casting fine, white dust on her cheekbones, high and curved on her face. I know that she is feeling the earth, and I ask her how.

“You can’t force it, Jeanine,” she says, only a whisper. “You let it come to you.”

She talks like it’s some kind of gift the earth gives to people, merging their energies into some inexplicable force. Maybe if that force was physical I wouldn’t have such a hard time grasping it.

“I don’t think it wants to meet me,” I say, sitting up, rubbing the dirt from my hands and folding them in my lap. I don’t have any paint on mine; I always cut them too short to sustain the shine of the polish.

Tia opens her eyes and looks at me. “Look up. What do you see?”

I fight off a sigh, knowing that this will be another one of her games. She doesn’t think of them as games, but I have a hard time seeing them as anything else. She’ll try to guide me toward some sort of crossroads, where I will invariably have to decide on a path. But I won’t ever decide because my brain will get in the way and ask all sorts of questions. Tia doesn’t question much and so she believes that no one else should.

I look up anyway and find those tiny beacons that so often haunt me. They make tiny blips against the sky’s black canopy. I think they might lead me home. “The night sky,” is all I say.

Tia reaches over to take one of my hands into hers and squeezes gently, but urgently. “But it’s not just that.”

I wait for her to continue, hold eye contact. I wish my eyes were as soft as hers. The moment passes between us in silence, and the frustration bubbles in my throat. I think I will be consumed by that feeling. It’s kept my words from coming out far too many times.

I turn away from her, pulling my hand back. “Alright.” I know I am anything but.

Tia doesn’t know what it’s like to be confined to her brain the way I am. She is less a human body and more a transporting aura, has never struggled to exist outside of herself.

“It’ll find you someday,” Tia says, after long minutes of quiet distance. She must recognize that there is something desperate in this kind of quiet.

The words comfort me until I realize that it could take a long time to reach someday, and I’m not sure I can wait that long. I am tired of soaking up the light from the stars but not being able to give anything back to them. I don’t know what it means to speak to them like Tia, how to find answers in them, how to feel the heat of their light wrap around me.

I tell her that, wanting to walk away this time with something different. The change might help me find what I’m looking for, or even let it find me like Tia keeps insisting.

“You know, your mother was the same way,” she says, her eyes suddenly cast over, a film like the clouds taking over. “It’s why she left. She was always looking too hard.”

I stay quiet at the mention of my mother. She’s one thing I don’t think about, sitting somewhere outside the sphere of my consciousness. It doesn’t make me upset that I can’t wrap my hands around the thought of her.

When Tia speaks next, her words fall into the open air. “Jeanine. You can’t let yourself look too hard. We are all made of different things.”

Her hand shuffles back through the grass to meet mine and she laces our fingers together. “And none of those things are wrong. You are not wrong.”

My grip tightens on her, and I put all the force I have into it. I don’t tell her what it means to hear her say that, just wanting to hold her hand. But I know that we’ll have to go back to the house soon because the nightly rain is beginning to shake the tree leaves. They make quiet noises to beat against the chirps of the cicadas.

The ground beneath me chills with the cold that comes through the nights and the sky is dark and looming. As I get up to go back inside, I notice that the grass and the soil have stained my clothes, and I feel an ache in my back from lying down for so long. I look to Tia as she rises and catch the graceful way her skirts twine around her legs, the way the moon reflects off her dark hair.

On the way back through the field, I think about what it would be like to see inside my heart. I’d like to pick it apart and see what it’s made of, if it matches anything I could find inside Tia’s. The heart is a tangible thing, unlike the soul, or the spirit. It’s funny how the heart is real and physical and I can hold it in my hands, but it produces such intangible things.