My mother always loved it when I would look up at the sky. As a child, I would watch the sunset and be filled with glee when the stars would begin to peek out from their hiding place. The sky would grow dark and the stars would slowly grow brighter, speckling the canvas that spread above our secluded farmhouse. She would watch me, wondering what I would be thinking as I stared for a little too long at the stars (When I was eight I thought they were other planets with other people living on them and I thought that maybe someday we could visit one of these other worlds). She never stopped me from stargazing the evenings away. I would sit in the unkempt grass, listening to the crickets chirp while feeling the breeze tickle my skin. The stars would look down at me but they never made me feel small. They made me feel grand; like someday I would be able to be bigger than I was. I was only a little kid at the time. My mother would call me in for supper and I would have to peel myself from the grass and push myself to go inside, all while staring up at the wondrous sky.
One evening, my mother joined me and she talked to me about the colors that blanketed us as the sun went to sleep for the night. She was an artist and loved to look for shapes in the clouds during the daytime but she mostly painted flowers that she would find in the fields and hills.
"What do the stars tell you?" she asked me. I was thirteen at the time.
I thought for a moment. "They tell me that there is more out there."
"What do you know about 'more'?" she smiled and laughed.
I thought for another second. "That we are here. Our whole lives are here." I reached my hand up and pointed to the stars while we lay in the grass by our front porch. I exhaled, "Everything else is out there. Where we'll never be."
My mother sighed and turned her face away from me to look at where I was pointing. "Maybe one day I'll be there," she chuckled.
I looked at her. "How?"
"Maybe that's where we all end up."
I didn't understand what she meant at the time but I thought that it would be a miracle to be able to join the stars; to shine like them, to be wished upon, to see the expanding universe, to look down upon the earth and watch the other dreamers wishing for their moment to transform.
Several years later my mother died.
I was eighteen when she left me. I never knew what was wrong; she never told me, but I did know that as the years went by she became weaker. She wouldn't join me to stargaze. She stopped painting. She cooked supper less and less. I would cook for us and feed her. She would stay in bed more and more. Laundry became my responsibility and I would get lost and stargaze as I hung our damp clothing and sheets on the clothesline. Then I would sit in the grass when the night took over; wishing that she would get better but she never did. I got older and she grew smaller.
Now our farmhouse was mine and mine alone. I carried on her business of selling eggs and chicks in the market. I kept her recipe for apple cider vinegar alive. I baked the bread that she would bake every Sunday to sell to our neighbors. I was getting by without her even though everything had changed. Even though I was now alone without any other family to speak of. My father left the farmhouse when I was a baby to go overseas and never returned and my mother was now buried in a cemetery twelve miles away from where we lived, surrounded by strangers she never knew. I was alone without anyone to lean on. The only thing that didn't change for me was the stars that clung to the sky. I knew that as long as I looked up they would be there. Even if it were cloudy, I knew that they remained.
One day in the kitchen of the farmhouse, her words fluttered back to me. The words she said when I was only thirteen.
"Maybe one day I'll be there."
Is this what she meant? Dying? When I had this overwhelming thought my heart sank as far as it did when I lost her. After this thought, I was afraid to look up. Will the stars claim me too? They claimed my mother; what's stopping them from coming for me?
"Maybe that's where we all end up," I remember her saying.
Her words now had a meaning that I didn't understand at the time they were said. I missed her, more than she could ever know, and now I feared the sky and the stars. The fear crept up quickly, making my blood run cold and my forehead sweat. They were something that I didn't want to fear though. They were my whole childhood, engrained in my memories, and they gave connection to my mother and me every time we sat in the grass outside to watch them. The stars were my closest thing to a family. If I feared them then I would be even more alone in the world.
I didn't want that fear. I didn't want those memories to be ruined. I ran outside of the farmhouse; staring at the grass. My head felt heavy with hesitation. After several breaths, I looked up and gasped.
I saw the stars. They were the same as always, only they felt brighter. They felt closer. They felt familiar. They felt like her.
I felt her. I felt her smile and her eyes watching me from above.
"Maybe one day I'll be there." And I believe that she is.