Stars (for A)

Once upon a time, there was a girl who kept the stars in her bedroom. One wall, next to her bed, stretched out into the black and shining distance, and was littered into infinity with countless points of light. This girl loved the stars with all her heart, and because she loved them so openly and clearly and without any thought of what she might get in return, the stars loved her back, and this was the first time, and the only time, that the stars have ever loved anyone.

At night, when she was curled up in her bed, she would stretch out a hand to the distant galaxies, and hear the stars whispering to her, asking her to come with them, promising to show her worlds beyond all her imaginings. So she would put on her little tartan dressing-gown, and tie it tight at the waist, and slide her slippers on to keep her feet warm, and she would step out into the wall by her bed onto a carpet of stardust that gave way just a little under her footsteps like a thick rug.

As she walked between them, the stars sang to her in soft ringing voices, in words from all the languages there have ever been in all the corners of the universe, and they told her all the stories from all the places they had brightened with their light since the first stars were so young they were barely a flicker in the night. They showed her the secret doors that open from one part of things to another, guiding her safely through places that weren't places at all, full of the shadows of great movements and of things becoming. They showed her the crystalline, perfect, cold realms of order, where there is no freedom, nothing is unexpected, and there is not so much as a breath to stir the air. They showed her too, the mad lands of chaos, where one moment or thing or thought has not even the slightest connection to the one before it or after it, or to anything else at all. No thread, no story, not even time, just stutter and nonsense.

Between these two extremes, and the third, which no one can find a way to talk about, not even if they've been there and come back again in their little tartan dressing gown, she visited every place of any interest in all of creation. Places of wonder, places of savagery, places made of nothing she could even understand. The stars, you see, loved this child so much, this little girl, that they wanted to give her the only gift they could, the only thing in all their aeons of blazing into the darkness that seemed to them to be worth anything to anyone. They wanted to show her that no matter what she saw when she left her bedroom, out the door and into the world she called home, with other people and their opinions and their customs to which they clung as if nothing else had ever existed, no matter what, the stars wanted her to know that what she saw and heard and felt was just one kind of thing thing among so many kinds of things that they were beyond counting. They wanted her to know that in the vastness of their domain, anything was possible, and they hoped that this knowledge would help the little girl who kept them on the wall in her bedroom to make peace with her world, no matter how strange it might sometimes seem. This was the stars' gift to her.