For Emma

Regina Trejo

She looked up at the night sky, bony binoculars glued under her brows. Where’s the damn moon, she asked herself in short, puffy breaths, over and over. Every time a light flashed into those lenses, she swore sweetness under her pain and removed the hardware; she was determined to see it with her own, bare eyes. A lamppost. A car’s headlight. A girl turning on the singular bulb in her bedroom. Those efforts were futile since the forecast didn’t predict that it was going to be overcast.

Thick clouds filled her eyes and hatred filled her heart. He took the moon. She knew he did. He took the one thing that followed her with every step and with every sway and with every joint-cracking bow she spared on him. What a devilish sight to see nothing but black-gray smoke stuffing an arena that once endorsed flying.

In her room, that night, she spat on a picture of him. She quickly wiped the saliva from his face to hers. It looked familiar—her own face drowned out by tears or showers that continued for far too long. She dropped the photo in the trash and watched it float like a feather to the top. She rearranged her garbage promptly. She brought the food scraps from the previous night’s dinner and the crumpled-up papers with song lyrics she tried to write, to the top. Anything meant more to her than him in that moment. Anything meant something when all she could feel was nothing.

The sky gave her nothing the next evening. Not even a star could poke out to reflect off the rain that drenched her three potted plants. The perennials gurgled cries for help, but they were so full of cold rain that all they could do was yell between gulps. She saw that they were drowning and brought them in. She tipped them over carefully in an effort to drain them, but dropped the pink flower with frightful ease. Great, another thing gone from my life, she said to herself in images and feelings.

On the third evening, she received a phone call from her dad. The dog was howling to the sound of the microwave alarm again, and he thought she would love the sound of the puppy’s deafening song. She couldn’t love anything, but appreciated the thought. We broke up, she told him, right before the line went dead. The dog was probably still howling. 100 | Perception

She went outside with no shoes on. She left them inside so she could feel the earth underneath and in between her toes. It felt alive and ripe, even in the presence of darkness. She always thought that the nighttime was a place for birth and first breaths. She was born at midnight. Born to the sound of her mother’s crying and to the sound of water rushing over her head and to the sound of her father’s pacifying coo of newfound fatherhood.

That night, she was born again, somewhere between two and three. Born under the glint of stars that spelled “I love you” in a language she made up herself and under the full-bodied reflection of the moon on the only puddle that hadn’t yet dried up and under the warmth of evening air only she knew how to feel.

When she retreated to sleep, the moon watched every move she made. It watched her stash away her binoculars while thick tears dropped from her eyes onto her pillow and watched her pull on a blanket of self-love that she had hidden away when she was in his presence. The stars joined in chorus to sing her a lullaby so sweet that she fell asleep with a smile across her face. She had gotten it all back, and then some.