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Something from a few years back, getting out of my own tiny head …

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When she thought about it, she realized she was a reaction to and reflection of her mom, in separate and unequal ways, that she was in many ways a series of responses to where she came from and how. 

And being reduced to that, rather than feeling reductive or lessening, it grew her mother from a singular person, honking and gasping for air and the next heartbeat, to something bigger, something cosmic. 

Because if she was merely a series of reactions, well, what is the universe but the same thing? And in this small, expansive world, her mom was the Big Bang. She could not exist without this First Mover, even as she looked through her mom’s celestial mantle and saw a succession of starbursts back and back through time. And she could sense that for her children, she too was a garden of stars, setting them on their way. 

She became not a collection of flaws and failures but an elemental force, carried forth by the muscular truths of matter and velocity. She was a force and would be far into the future.

This conception of being a birther of constellations, mom to collisions and catastrophes and daybreak and nightfall, it stayed with her deep into sleep that night, tucked up close to her chin like her blanket. 

And she felt better.