Fumbling hands pasted wet newspaper strips around a small balloon. Soon splashed with shades of fire, the little girl’s Jupiter took its clumsy shape. Aspirations rooted in paper-machê.
The cosmos would summon her, to join Sirius in gazing at Earth from afar. Sit by the Centauri siblings to watch the moon pass by. See how its glow is dimmer, snuffed in the dark vastness. A lackluster hunk of rock when seen amongst stars, yet a brilliant mirror when viewed from her bay window.
The galaxy’s whispers led her to books which told stories about that same vastness. She’d read under the covers, flashlight in hand, learning of neighbors Phobos and Deimos, of a ringed giant ten times the size of home, of comets and their dusty tails. Her eyes glazed over each photograph until darkness fell with tired eyelids. Nightly occurrences under a ceiling speckled with glow in the dark stars.
With every passing year, she steps closer to weightlessness and the white suit. To her dreams of seeing Earth for the blue that it truly is. To feeling microscopic, seeing fears shrink before her eyes. If billions of humans were too small to see from space, how daunting could failure be? Could it exist past the thermosphere? And as her hands grow larger, more determined, she reaches further to grasp wisps of nebulae. Endlessly eager to befriend the unknown.
Though nights now hold pages upon pages of differentials and voids of dreamless sleep, she returns to her roots every so often. She gazes up at her sunlit satellite and smiles. Basked in an embrace that glistens pearl, she listens as the cosmos sings out to her. By that bay window, clumsy Jupiter steady in her lap, she closes her eyes and exhales, ready to answer its call.