Shooting Stars
You convinced me that the pebble in your palm was part of a star that had fallen from the heavens when you opened your mouth for the first time and screamed down the gods to demand an explanation of why you had to do this all again. I was too young to know what you meant when you called yourself an old soul. Reincarnation hadn’t been covered in school, the idea of living, dying, living, dying, living over and over held the same impact on my mind as when my mother tried to explain gravity by dropping household items from various heights onto the kitchen floor while telling me that it was an invisible force beneath my feet that kept me from floating off the planet. When I grew older I learnt that stars did not become pebbles and for a while I wondered if you’d meant to say it was a meteor, a little fragment of space debris you’d discovered by accident in a black pockmark upon your father’s perfect lawn. It took me …