Sometimes, I do wish the moon would come further into my room, seeping under my window, and eat me for dinner.
Grace Michel Muawad, age 27, died in her bed from disintegration by moonshine.
Suppose you were to come home and find me not there. Gone, disappeared, vanished. Taken? Perhaps. Perhaps the moon needed me more. A waxing crescent with an edacious appetite. 7.38 days to digest and then Look! a full swell.
In death I am useful: a sailor’s shiny compass. What is useful about a pile of white bones wrapped in cloth, groaning into the earth?
I was told the moon is God’s thumbnail. I like to look up at night, watch him try to rip open the sky. Would the stars come falling? Hurtling down? Light us on fire, God! Sit back, chomp on popcorn, and suck down soda as we run around like ants in a stomped-on anthill.
“Learning that light might be coming from stars no longer in existence amazed me. I wanted to be an astronomer.” - Mary Cisper
I wish to be licked by flames and awash in moon. I have a reoccurring desire to be scalded and balmed. But mostly, I want to be an astronomer. I plan to study celestial bodies as intimately as my own. A constellation of freckles across my cheeks, my nose, my chest, my shoulders, my eyelids, the inside of my ears.
Stars expire in the sky. Girls crumble into women. I am forever marked by the day I was burned on a mountaintop one summer in North Carolina. I tilt my head back on a dark quiet night to see dead stars shine. And when I say love, I do mean loss. For there is no gravity to a thing without consequence. I worship the moon, and it swallows me whole.
Grace Michel Muawad, 1997-2024, died a lunar death.