i stopped believing in magic it felt kind of like this

              I learned the story of the stars from my mother, like everything else I know. Diasana is their queen. When I was small I loved that name, how it sounded when spoken with my mother’s humming voice. I would mouth it to myself after she said it—Diasana, Diasana—a silent echo spoken into her hair. The cluster of stars that resembles a woman reaching up to the moon—Diasana is the tip of that woman’s highest finger. She has seven children, all stars, and she was born of the moon. The story of the stars is in fact the story of the moon.

You see, long ago (“before even I lived,” my mother would say) there were no stars and the moon didn’t shine on the earth. She kept all her milkblue light inside her center, her surface appearing as dead brown rock. Her light was her secret, her pure glowing treasure, and she waited for someone to tell it to. She considered her suitors—the great pink-orange rings around a distant fellow orb (too capricious), the blazing sun that shone on her half her life (too indiscreet), and even the darkness that enveloped her when the golden light moved away (too suffocating). She was weary of waiting.  

One night the moon was very lonely and wept. She closed her eyes as she wept and the tears slid down her stone face, dropped through the darkness, and dripped down onto our blue sphere. They ran down the mountains like shimmering melted wax and came to rest on the surface of the ocean. The water acted as a mirror, as the sun had taught it to do. It had never known light that wasn’t sunlight—it was a very strange night for the water, too, but it’s the moon’s story, not the water’s (“That one will come later, little love” she would say). Confronted with her mist-like light, the water threw an image of the moon’s face back to her. She opened her eyes. For a beautiful, terrible time, the moon thought that her lover had come to her. A being like her, but more worthy, more beautiful, much more than she was or could be, one she had longed for and dreamt of and worshipped and loved and believed, truly believed, would come for her. Joy filled her like honey in a jar. A smile broke out on her face, and in doing so broke the hard brown rock of her skin. It shattered and its shards landed all around her in the darkness.

She waited for her love to draw closer, but her image remained fixed. She waited for five hundred years, an odd in-between time in our history, in which there were lightless stars and a still imprint of the moon upon the sea. Finally she understood. No one told her. She had to come to the knowledge herself. It began as doubt. It grew into certainty, a sad certainty that no one could confirm or deny. When she at last knew that the sight before her was not her love, but only herself—her sadness and longing projected onto a watery trick—her heart broke. It would have stopped beating, but she was immortal, and so it never could.

A volcanic display of tears followed. She began weeping and has never stopped. That’s why she glows always now, even in the daytime when we can hardly see her. That’s why we see the stars, the pieces of her stone face scattered through the sky by her sacrificial smile, then illuminated in the glow of her light, which seeps out through her tears. She had waited and waited, and in the end found only her own want staring back at her with indifference.

Her tears will never cease. She is shedding them now.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I have become the moon. I have stopped waiting. Nothing is coming.

M said that a metaphor is a beautiful story used to tell a truth that is either too complicated or too difficult to be told any other way.

If you want to eat a bird and you don’t have a knife or an arrow you have to catch it with your hands. In order to catch it with your hands you have to move closer to the bird without letting it know that you’ve seen it. You must keep it in the corner of your eye and side step closer. When you reach it you must grab it in your hands and wring its neck without looking at it. If you look at it before you grab it, the bird will fly away. If you look at it after your grab it, the betrayal in the bird’s black eyes might break your heart, and you will loosen your grip on it and lose it to the wind, or snap it’s neck anyway, and live with that feeling forever.

See what I’ve done, M? A metaphor about metaphors.

See what I’ve done, mother? I’ve become the moon.