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A Mostly True Story about the Moon
Once upon a time I held a piece of the moon in my hand, a pebble no bigger than a postage stamp. It didn’t look like moon; it looked like desert. It looked like it needed documentation, an affidavit to prove it wasn’t a lie. There were people who still believed the moon surface we saw on television was really Arizona, an American trick to fool the little countries and the children. And so I tested it. It didn’t shine. It didn’t make the level in my water glass rise or fall. Nothing bled or stopped bleeding. Nothing howled. The crumb of moon lay in my palm like a broken off piece of a dream, a quarter note parted from a hundred thousand moony songs, love’s magic gone incognito. I tried to remember it from when I was small and lay on my back in dewy summer twilight staring up and wondering about jumping cows and green cheese, and who it would make kiss me someday. I didn’t recognize it after all these years, didn’t trust it, even though I, too, turned out more ordinary than I thought I’d be, further from the things I’d been a part of. I wished I could take its lonesome self out and show it, up close, how the tide really feels around your feet and what an eclipse looks like from here and how, if I held it at just the right distance, it would blot out the rest of itself in the night sky. But as I said, I too had grown a little less sure of myself than I used to be, so instead I left it, knowing two things— that I couldn’t help it any more than it could help me, and that the moon in the summer twilight would never be quite full again.
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