Maddison Taylor
What I Learned This Week About Being Alone in the Sky
If the moon is directly overhead, you will weigh
slightly less. When the moon is full, the side
of the Earth closest to it expands, as if the planet
wants to touch its counterpart. In order to avoid
spreading a virus, you must resist contact
with surfaces, with clothes, with other people’s
hands. This week I learned that it’s hard
to be my mother during a quarantine.
Her fear expands, touches me with its spidery
reach, like the veins that stretch her skin,
making craters. She is scared of dying too
young, leaving the way my father did, before
he could form the words, I love you, before she
felt the pull of her daughter’s love. Still, I have
no calendar to plot the orbit of my mother.
Perhaps William James was right, time gets faster
as we get older. I am moving at the speed
of the light it takes to get from here to there.
Maddison Taylor is a student at Woodbury University in Burbank, Calif. Her interview with the poet Reuben Ellis appears in Athena. She has served as literature editor and social media manager for the student-produced literary magazine, MORIA. Maddison lives in Los Angeles.
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