Breathing Starlight
I wrote this 10 months ago. A year tomorrow. I miss you, mom.
My mother had deep, dark brown eyes.
The kind that held mischief and sorrow in equal measure.
Eyes that watched the world too closely, but never turned away from it.
My brother has them now.
Sometimes I wonder if he sees her when he looks in the mirror.
If that flicker of familiar softness, that deep-set knowing,
ever catches him off guard the way it catches me.
She’s in there.
Not as a ghost—but as inheritance.
She called herself a hippie.
Not the kind you find in boutiques or hashtags.
She was old-school wild.
Desert-born, barefoot, sun-warmed and soul-weary.
She didn’t decorate her freedom. She lived it.
She didn’t talk about her belief in Jesus—not because it wasn’t real,
but because shame got in the way.
She thought sinners weren’t allowed to speak of grace.
But she was grace.
Raw. Cracked. Pure in ways that can’t be fabricated.
She forgave too easily and loved too hard.
She stayed longer than she should have.
She hurt in silence and laughed like music.
She never apologized for being more than one thing at once.
When I was a child in Arizona, the sky felt like it belonged to us.
There were no city lights to drown it out.
Only stars—fierce, blazing, present.
I memorized constellations like scripture.
Orion’s Belt. The Pleiades. The Milky Way.
She danced beneath them like they were watching just her.
Now, I live where the stars hide.
Where the sky is noisy.
Where grief is quieter but somehow heavier.
Sometimes I look up and I can't tell if what I’m seeing is a star or something manmade.
That’s how she feels now, too.
Still there. Just… out of reach.
She’s only been gone two and a half months.
But I feel her absence like a second skin.
Not loud. But everywhere.
People try to imitate women like her.
They throw macramé on their walls and call it soul.
But she wasn’t aesthetic.
She was freckled shoulders and earth-scarred feet.
She was water and wildfire.
She was rage and tenderness.
She was the kind of woman whose presence lingered—long after she left the room.
And now that she’s gone?
That wildness, that ache, that magic
lives in the people who survived her.
It lives in the brother who carries her eyes.
It lives in the sky we still search when we need answers.
It lives in the quiet belief we inherited, even if we don't speak it aloud.
Some people are left to wonder how much their mothers loved them.
But not us.
I think my brother and I were a second chance for her—
a way to love the little girl she once was.
The one who survived.
She’s not gone.
She just moved into the constellations.
She still dances with the stars.
Mom always said I could do anything.
Be anything.
Do amazing things.
I wish I would have told her
that being her daughter was enough.