THREE. astronomy

         The death of a star is quite tragic. Did you know that the brighter a star burns, the more dramatically it dies? The star grows too big for its own good and exhausts its supply of hydrogen until there is nothing left to support the star against the Draw of gravity. The biggest of the stars produce supernovae when they die, and for one radiant month a single giant burns brighter than the entire galaxy.

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         There is a whole universe contained within her. Her eyes drip deep and dark, and her pupils are large empty black holes, ever-expanding.
         Her skin, paper thin, is the Milky Way, pale and undulating, washed out. It’s freckled with constellations and dotted with stars. Her hair, rings of fire and as unruly as the solar storms that cover Saturn’s surface. Her temper is like the solar flares that rise up every year and make everyone flee into the arms of loved ones in order to spend one more day, one more night with them. The flares always pass anyways. Her smile is like the death of a star, a hasty explosion of life and color, then gone as quickly as it came. It warms everyone temporarily--without it we cannot survive--and then in a flash it dissipates into darkness.
         She’d like to go to outer space one day, she says. She thinks she would fit in up there if she can’t here on earth; she knows she would make tons of friends…

         I want to run amongst the nebulae and kick around stars, I want to be burned by the sun’s light, I want to be weightless. I want to draw out galaxies and revolve around the moon as it revolves around us. I want to watch the miniscule humans, unseen by all of them, as they go about their mundane lives. I want to be a phantom, as black as night, and I want to be the sun too. I want to be feared. Don’t you?

Sorry galaxy girl but that’s simply not possible, I say. And she laughs and it’s the sound of comets raining down from the mesosphere.

And then one day, she took off.

I haven’t seen her since.