On a playground once, someone told Susan that the smallest galaxy in existence sat nestled on the collar of a cat named Orion and the fourth largest was headquartered in McLean Virginia. The second was edible and the first was also edible but there was no telling what would happen if in fact, someone swallowed a galaxy of stars in miniature. They told her that maybe, a person might explode from the plurality, the multiplicity, words she had to go home and look up, but mostly, they said, if someone did in fact eat a Galaxy with a capital G, they’d probably just feel a bit ill and gassy and special because they carried a secret only three people and a rabbit name Kane knew about.

These facts, told to her in front of the monkey bars just before the lunch bell, proved to be too much for her to leave amongst the mulch. It was knowledge that materially changed the matter below her feet and on her hands and in her lungs in such a way that she became hyper-aware of how moved her body through space, something girls learned for other reasons, but that Susan learned early and associated with cataclysmic black holes and deaths of universes caused by the movement of man. It was a secret that she guarded close: That Galaxies weren’t just above her but in fact, all around her and if she wasn’t careful, she’d step on one or eat one or lose one in her neighborhood when walking the dog and it would be her fault.

So, rather than looking up at stars and wondering about the slots of dark in between pins of light, Susan spent her childhood inspecting the insides of dew and recording the points of a snowflake on her mitten and breaking Nerds open with a mini hammer until her fingers were sticky with their dyed white shells. She collected rose quartz and hematite and spent hours pouring over them with a microscope, convinced that the swirl within each unique stone meant she’d saved another world and its set of impossibly small inhabitants.

Later, a therapist would tell her that, in all of those places, she’d just been looking for a version of herself that didn’t exist anymore, but, by then, it was too late and this diagnosis did not surprise her. She already knew she couldn’t be saved, that she’d dedicated her life to the galaxies beneath her feet that no one else cared about and that she was so aware of the grief of that loss, it hurt little bones in her toes. And anyway, at this point, at this age, she knew better than to look for herself anymore because she’d already been found when she’d fallen in love during her seventeenth year on Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy with a boy named Larson Carmichael. Specifically, because she could pinpoint exactly where and when her world had stopped, it was because he’d taken her to the upper reaches of Maine on a snowy evening in December, a farmland plain sheeted in snow at the end of a dirt road. There were only Mennonite buggies and the headlights of their Ford which they quickly turned off, and he asked her to come outside with him and look up because this was the only place on Earth you could really see everything, everything. She braced herself hard against the ground and asked for forgiveness and forced her eyes to that sky, more aware of him looking at her than of what she was seeing and he said, doesn’t it look like confetti on a party floor, all those galaxies like the Hubble showed us. Doesn’t it make you feel small and like none of it matters, and the knowledge hit her: She’d had it wrong all along, that everything mattering had crushed her daily, but it didn’t. Matter. In that dark-light, his words nearly brought her to her knees. She had only ever felt too large, too responsible for being the destroyer of worlds she could never see, not like this, and so, she let her eyes really rest on the night sky of Benedicta. And what she saw in those endless constellations and miles of stars layered on top of one another like cake, was not an abyss but, herself.