Counting Constellations
Stars have a language all their own.
The stars blinked at her through the sun roof
as her mother peeled the car out of the driveway,
and only one look back through the rearview
was the last time she saw her dad's face.
Twenty years and a few therapy sessions later,
she found herself tracing the Big Dipper one night
and wondered just what it was all for, this life.
She could count the places on her fingertips—
all the way from Sacramento to Chicago—
where her mother had thought they could live
a new life with all the days before left behind.
The only constants had been the stars,
each one steadfast in the night sky,
as she tried to find pictures in the dark.
Even as the years clipped away her naivete,
she still found herself looking up star charts
and telling herself their stories as if they were
her own tales from long, long ago—
another life, an existence she'd forgotten,
some myth that truly was hers to own.
The locations changed, the scope shifted,
but still her stars greeted her by nightfall,
breathing as if they were one with her.
Her eyes grew dim with age, as they did,
until the world was eclipsed in shadow,
but in her mind's eye she still remembered
how the stars would always welcome her home,
truer than anything she had ever known.
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About the Creator
Jillian Spiridon
just another writer with too many cats
twitter: @jillianspiridon
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