For every star in the sky

That memory. The one everyone looks back to, decades later, when its edges fog like an old photograph, the one they tell at funerals and to friends and family, the one they hold close, wrap around them when time runs still and nothing feels like it matters until its seams fray and even then, clasp on and don’t let go. They say death only ends lives, not relationships; that there are things death can not, can never touch. 

My grandmother always basked in the outdoors, in the way the crisp air tickled her nose and swept through every strand of her fine, silver hair. We spent afternoons and mornings and nights in the wooded backyards; we’d race to an opera of birds, crickets, wind. The sun sang for her. 

And when night crawled over us, stretching its clawed fingers over my bedroom window, when the nightmares came, even as the air chilled my bones and the darkness swaddled me, suffocating us like weights, she would still flap blankets onto the grass, still go for midnight picnics ‘cause she “felt like it” (but really ‘cause I would be a quivering, overly-large blanketed mess). Those nights I swore each star in the night sky was crying, leaking, trickling light-like tears, fat, bulbous drops. Sometimes I wanted to cry with them, with each sequin of the studded sky that gleamed so mournfully. Sometimes I did cry with them, and we would cry together, side by side. Grandma would say each star was a lost soul, enchant me with stories like see that small one up there, a little bit left, that one, they call that one Orion, and the one next to him, that’s Polaris, the North Star, the brightest in the sky; the Norse say she’s the center of the universe and everything revolves around her. All of them cried for something, night after night, she murmured. Cried until their tears washed out the sky with light and the sun rose. 

Each star is unique, she’d say, stamping rough-warm kisses onto my forehead. Her fingers would seize my nose and wriggle it; she smelled like pine. Her fingers, layers of skin wrinkling onto each other, would point towards the tapestry of the night sky, embezzled with minuscule diamonds. Look at their lives, she’d whisper. One day, you’ll watch me from down here, she muttered. I didn’t truly understand what she meant, and how could I? Why she would ever leave, why I would be here and she wouldn’t. 

There’s a saying that parents should never bury their children. Perhaps it's doubled for grandparents. I wonder what memory she tells other people about me, about the child with perpetually-scraped knees and a nose bright-shiny-red from over-rubbing, who raced through the woods without a care in the world. Orion and Polaris adore my stories about her, about swinging in the backyard and the way you toweled my hair dry too roughly and picked weeds out of my pants every night and now tears stream down our faces, together, every night waiting. 

I’ve been watching. From my little seat in the sky, I’ve peered down at my grandma spending her evenings in that swing, her weathered fingers stroking the edges of a fogged photograph, an empty space beside her down on Earth while I watch, an empty space beside me.