Catch the Moon

 

She taught me to catch the moon with my bare hands when I was seven, standing barefoot in the backyard while summer crickets sang their ancient lullabies. Cup your palms like this, she whispered, like you're holding water that wants to stay. And I did—I cupped my small hands toward that silver coin hanging low and fat above the maple tree, certain I could pluck it from the sky like fruit.

Now I'm forty-three and still reaching for impossible things.

The moon lives in my coffee cup some mornings, fractured and trembling on the surface of bitter dreams. I drink it down, swallow that captured light, let it settle in my chest like a secret I've been keeping from myself. There's something about the way moonlight pools in empty rooms that makes me understand why women have always been accused of lunacy—we know what it means to be pulled by invisible tides, to feel our bodies respond to something distant and untouchable.

I catch the moon in puddles after rain, in the curve of a lover's spine when they're sleeping turned away from me, in the hollow of my own throat when I throw my head back laughing. It's there in the silver stretch marks mapping my hips like tributaries of light, in the way my grandmother's hands looked when she was dying—translucent, luminous, already halfway to somewhere else.

Some nights I stand at my window and remember being seven, remember believing I could hold the universe in my palms. Now I know better. Now I know the moon catches us—pulls us out of ourselves, makes us howl and weep and write love letters to people who will never read them. Makes us stand in gardens at 2 AM, arms outstretched, trying to embrace the sky.

But maybe that's what it means to be alive. To keep reaching for things that can't be held. To let the moon live in our blood, silver and wild and forever just beyond our fingertips. To understand that some things are meant to be chased, not caught. That the catching is in the reaching, the moon already in our bones, luminous and strange and perfectly, impossibly ours.