Chapter 10 - The Stars Above
That night, after everyone had gone home and the house was quiet, I walked upstairs to check on Ella.
Her door was slightly ajar, a warm beam of light spilling out into the hallway. I peeked inside.
Ella was sitting on her wide windowsill, her telescope pointed out toward the clear, dark sky over the lake. She was wearing a pair of comfortable cotton pajamas, her dark curls tumbling over her shoulders, holding a small notebook in her lap where she was writing down star coordinates.
I knocked softly on the wooden doorframe. "Mind if I join you?"
Ella looked up, her face lighting up with a brilliant, unreserved smile. "Come look, Mom! I found Saturn!"
I walked across the room, sat down on the cushioned window seat beside her, and leaned over to look through the eyepiece of the telescope.
There, suspended in the vast, deep blackness of space, was a tiny, perfect, glowing sphere surrounded by its iconic, shimmering rings. It was small, fragile-looking, yet impossibly bright against the dark void around it.
"It’s beautiful, Ella," I whispered, stepping back so she could look again.
"Do you know what's cool about Saturn, Mom?" Ella asked, her hazel eyes sparkling under the dim amber glow of her reading lamp.
"Tell me."
"The rings look like they're solid from far away," she explained, gesturing with her small hands. "But when you get closer, you realize they’re actually made of millions of tiny, independent pieces of ice and rock. They don't stay together because someone forces them to. They stay together because they’re all following the same light."
I pulled my nine-year-old daughter into my lap, resting my chin on top of her head as we both looked out at the infinite universe above the quiet lake.
For thirty-four years, I had believed that I was defined by the empty spaces people left for me—the erased figures, the unspoken secrets, the conditional love that demanded I shrink myself to fit into someone else's narrow frame.
But sitting here in the home we had built with our own hands, surrounded by truth, love, and light, I finally understood.
May you like
You cannot be erased by people who do not have the capacity to see you.
The picture above our fireplace was complete. Our lives were full. And as I held my daughter close under a sky filled with a billion shining stars, I knew that neither of us would ever have to ask for permission to exist again.
