Chapter 2
CHAP 2: lost stars
The cool morning breeze flapped its wings and flew through the window and tickled her little chin. She smiled, half asleep. Mom always told her to go to sleep and wake up with a smile, then only will you catch good dreams and wake up in the sweet aftereffects of it.
She never used to question her mom (though she would do that a lot when she grew up). For now, her mama’s words were like a lovely lullaby, playing on a loop, over and over in her head. Minnie finally let her eyes flutter open and takes in the familiarity of the pale-yellow stars painted on her ceiling, there were still 6 of them, she had a habit of counting them every morning …she would often recall counting them and tell her mom “See stars don’t really disappear in the morning “. “Yes, you are right minnie, they shine throughout …just like you “, mom would say and this would make minnie give the widest of her toothless grins. She genuinely did believe she was a star too, that she was meant to shine … She hugged her teddy bear pillow tightly one last time and jumped off sleep’s comfy palms aka her bed and frolicked to the kitchen where her mom was probably busy making pancakes .
Thud...Minnie fell down crashing to the floor...,as Grace woke up from her dream . Smiling, confused and blurry eyed, she looked around and finally things came back to her and her smile began to fade. The water shivering in her glass before the plane crash, the lost hazy look on the face of that child, the way she had fought on the phone with her mom just before the plane had took off, the waves of memory retreated back to the sea of her mind like a tsunami in reverse. Now she was sitting in the backseat of a taxi, on her way to the hospital. The car had just jumped over a speed bump, that’s what woke her up. She quickly typed out a message to her mom, saying “uhm mom something happened ,can you call me pls” …but then with the feeling of a needle prick into her heart she remembered what her mom had said before hanging up the phone,”you don’t know what you are doing grace,you don’t know anything” . She deletes the message as impulsively as she had typed it and mutes her phone. It was true, she didn’t know what she was doing. Why couldn’t she just stop trying, trying so hard to shine. Why can’t she accept that she is just a lost star, one that would never end up on a little girl’s ceiling, one that she would never look up to. She closed her eyes and tasted her tears as she tried to smile and go back to sleep. “Why did she call me minnie tho”, grace wondered …