Taking Attendance

tonight the air is softer.

the concrete is still cold beneath my back,
but the wind has finally remembered
how to be kind.

i think i could stay here forever,
if forever only meant
until morning.

the lights keep appearing
one by one, quietly,
like they're trying not to wake anybody.

i wonder if they know
i'm looking for them.

sometimes i think
they blink on purpose.
not to be noticed.
to answer.

i've gotten very good
at waiting for the next one.

i whisper numbers
that disappear before they reach my lips.

if i lose count,
i start over.
it feels important
not to get it wrong.

the pale one is already awake tonight.

it always seems to know
where to find me.

i like to imagine
someone else is looking, too.
maybe if we both stay still enough,
the light won't know
which one of us to leave first.

grown-ups always say
that looking up
won't change anything.

but they never stay long enough
to see the sky changing back.

they don't notice
how darkness slowly gives things away.

how even the smallest lights
refuse to stay hidden forever.

they only call it night.

they never wait
for the part
where everything begins to answer.

my neck hurts.
my arms are cold.
i should probably go inside.

just...
not yet.

there are still a few lights
i haven't seen.
and someone might be waiting
for me to find them.

Author’s Note:
Originally Written: June of 2002 - What it feels like to discover that the language you've been speaking your entire life wasn't learned... it was remembered.

When I first found this poem again, I thought it was about the stars. Then I thought it was about my grandmother. Then my father. Then grief itself. Each time I reread it, a different face seemed to emerge from between the lines, as though the poem had quietly spent all these years waiting for me to become old enough to recognize who had been speaking through it. But the longer I sat with it, the more those interpretations began to feel like shadows cast by something even larger. I don't think this poem is really about the stars, or my grandmother, or my father. I think it's about a little girl standing at the edge of everything she couldn't control, trying with all the determination a child can muster to prove that distance wasn't the same thing as disappearance. Because to a child, those two things cannot be allowed to mean the same. If they do, the world becomes unbearably fragile. Children don't know how to negotiate with illness. They don't know how to unlock prison doors or bargain with time. So they negotiate with the only thing that still feels willing to listen: ritual. They invent impossible rules because impossible rules are kinder than helplessness. They decide that if they count carefully enough, wait patiently enough, love fiercely enough, maybe the people they miss won't drift quite so far away. It isn't logic. It isn't denial. It's hope desperately trying to build itself a home before fear gets there first.

When I was little, my grandmother made me a promise that only a grandmother could make with a straight face. She was sick, bedridden and oxygen-dependent, and I hated leaving her house because children have a way of believing that if they aren't there to witness tomorrow, tomorrow might simply decide not to happen. Every goodbye felt dangerous, like I was somehow increasing the odds by walking out the front door. Every trip home felt like gambling with something I loved more than I knew how to name. I remember lingering in doorways, finding reasons to hug her one more time, memorizing the sound of her voice without realizing that's what I was doing. There was a quiet panic that settled into my chest every time I looked back at her room from the car window, wondering if I had just seen her for the last time without knowing it. I told her, through choked tears, I was scared she’d die. So she cupped my face in her hands and gave me a job instead of an answer. She told me that every star I could count in the night sky meant one more day with her. Not forever. Just one more day. It was an impossible promise wrapped in the kind of tenderness only a child would accept without question, and somehow that made it feel more believable than any explanation an adult could have offered. So every night, I climbed onto the cold concrete storm pit in front of Pawpaw's, stretched out beneath a sky far too vast for such a little girl, and counted until my eyes burned and sleep finally won. I wasn't wishing on stars. I wasn't admiring constellations. I was performing my assignment with the solemn devotion only a child can give to something she believes might save the person she loves. I wasn't watching the night sky. I was keeping my grandmother alive the only way I knew how.

Around that same time, my father was delivered a prison sentence that would quietly steal my childhood from us. I was six years old when he left. Six is too young to understand sentencing guidelines, parole hearings, death row, or the complicated failures that unravel adult lives. Six doesn't know the difference between years and forever. Six only understands absence. Six only knows that someone who used to tuck you in, make you laugh, or fill a room with their voice... suddenly isn't there anymore. The reasons don't matter because they can't compete with the empty space left behind. So my father gave me his own impossible instruction. He told me to look for him in the moon because he would be beneath that very same moon, looking up and thinking about Chris and me, too. To an adult, it was probably meant as comfort. To a little girl, it became certainty. If the moon found me, then somehow my father could, too. Suddenly, the night sky wasn't just filled with stars keeping my grandmother close. It held my father as well. Every time the moon climbed slowly over the tree line, bright and familiar as an old friend, it became proof that distance really was not the same thing as disappearance. Prison walls could keep us apart. Illness could threaten tomorrow. Life could scatter the people I loved across places I couldn't reach. But none of it could divide the sky. Every evening, everything my heart ached for eventually appeared overhead, stitched together by the same darkness that once frightened me. No wonder I became obsessed with the moon and the stars. They were never distant objects suspended in space… They were the only place in the world where everyone I loved still existed together.

I don't think fourteen-year-old me wrote that because she imagined the stars were lonely. I think she desperately wanted to believe that love traveled in both directions. That somewhere beyond everything she couldn't see or touch, someone was looking at the very same sky with her name quietly resting in their heart. Not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Because distance had not diminished their love any more than it had diminished hers. Reading this poem now, I realize something fourteen-year-old me never could have articulated, even though she had been living it for years… The stars were never just twinkling lights scattered across the darkness. They were my grandmother whispering, I can't promise forever, sweetheart, but I can promise today. The moon was never just the moon. It was my father answering, We're standing beneath the same sky, even if we can't stand beside each other. Those are two profoundly different kinds of love, spoken under impossibly different circumstances, yet somehow they taught me the exact same language. Look up whenever you miss someone. So I did. Again and again. Until the night sky stopped feeling like part of nature and became part of my family. It became the only place where illness couldn't reach, prison couldn't contain, and separation wasn't quite so absolute. Every evening, I climbed onto that slab of concrete believing I wasn't simply staring into the darkness, I was checking on the people I loved. Taking attendance the only way I knew how. Making sure my grandmother was still tucked safely among the stars, my father still waiting faithfully beneath the moon, and somehow, impossibly, convincing myself that as long as I kept looking up, none of us were ever completely alone.

Before I found this poem again, I would have told you I had outgrown all of that. My grandmother died when I was eight. That no amount of counting ever persuaded the stars to bargain for one more tomorrow. That my father is still in prison, and somewhere along the way, our relationship became another kind of absence altogether. I would have told you that children eventually learn the universe does not negotiate, that moons don't carry conversations, and that light cannot undo the places life has broken. And then I found this poem. Suddenly, I wasn't just reading the words of a fourteen-year-old girl, I was meeting the little one who came before her, stretched out on a storm pit, the rough concrete pressing into her shoulders and her eyes fixed on a sky that felt impossibly large. And almost without thinking, I caught myself doing it again. One... two... three... My lips moved before my mind had a chance to object. It wasn't frantic anymore. There was no desperate bargaining hidden behind the numbers. No fear that getting the count wrong might cost someone another morning. It was quieter than that. Gentler. More like muscle memory than belief. I still catch myself smiling when the moon first rises, as though some small part of me hopes it might carry that smile to the people I love, wherever they are. The first stars still make me linger a little longer before I go inside. I still look up when I miss someone. Not because I believe the stars can keep anyone alive, but because somewhere inside me lives a little girl who taught herself that love is something you practice, even when there is nothing left you can do. I hope I never grow out of that. Because the stars didn't fail me. The moon didn't lie. They were never responsible for keeping my grandmother alive or bringing my father home. They were only ever responsible for carrying a frightened little girl through circumstances far too heavy for her small hands. And they did. Every single night. They carried a frightened little girl through losses she was never meant to understand, and they taught her something that has outlived every impossible bargain she ever made: that even when love cannot change an ending, it can still change the way we endure it.

So, if you ever catch me smiling at the moon or quietly counting stars beneath my breath, don't mistake it for superstition. It's simply the oldest language my heart still knows.