THE SPACE BETWEEN STARS

.. "I used to know a sculptor... 

he always said that if you looked hard enough, 

you could see where each person carried his soul in his body. 

It sounds crazy, but when you saw his sculptures, it made sense. 

I think the same is true with those we love...  

our bodies carry our memories of them, 

in our muscles, in our skin, in our bones. 

’My children are right here.’, she pointed to the inside curve of her elbow. 

Where I held them when they were babies. 

Even if there comes a time when I don't know who they are anymore. 

I believe I will feel them here."

- Erica Bauermeister, 

'the School of Essential Ingredients'

My child is right here, I think to myself and search for the word
for the place between collarbone and jawline as I trace my own skin.
I realize there is a place where I carry him still,
for when I find it my hand bends softly in a semilunar shape in the air,
in a soft bend as if grasped it still the whole of his small downy head.
There I held him when he was a baby and it's there I feel him still.

On his own skin it's also right there that his second ever
birthmark has just formed. A tiny dot so faint it feels as if it could
start flickering like a faraway star and fade away again.
His first, and for a long time only birthmark, is identical to one
I've had myself my entire life. A larger, all round and softly shaped bump,
impossible to escape, between the bend of the arm and the wrist.
One I would try to hide with sleeves and felt ashamed of when younger,
for reasons I can't even remember now. His one looks faultlessly
like mine and is placed specifically in the same spot.
In a letter once, before we had even met, his pappa wrote that
our birthmarks are star maps, arranged so that we will
find each other through the lives, again and again.

I hold my hand there, in the air right above my skin. Our place.
Another truth that can't quite be identified, only felt.
The understanding that such weight, such soul, is often found in the
seemingly empty spaces.