Paper Stars

The jar of stars sat on my bookshelf. There were thirty-seven of them left. I pick one up - it was blue and shiny, with imprints of Piglet on it. I unravel the star into its original long strip of gloss on one side and white on the other. Convenient for leaving messages.

"The way you close your eyes when you smell coffee in the morning," the star said.

A year ago you presented me with a jar of paper stars. Green and yellow, blue and pink, sparkly and cheerful and gaudy and bright. Your eyes held a mischievous glow, the same look preschoolers possess when they've done something they're proud of and couldn't wait to share. 

Three hundred and sixty-five stars, you proclaimed in that soft spoken manner of yours. You'd always look bashful, even at moments like these. As if you expected me to mock your efforts, that I'd laugh at you for trying. Still with your eyes slightly avoiding mine, like you were almost going to take the gift back and go "forget it, it's a dumb idea", you explained that I was supposed to unravel one star per day, every day until my next birthday. Three hundred and sixty-five things you loved about me were written on the back of the stars, to last me for an entire year. 

"You managed to think of three hundred?" My hands trembled slightly as I fished one out of the jar. 

A lump formed in the back of my throat as I unrolled the paper star. "I love the transfixed manner you listen to Michele McLaughlin," you wrote.

My fingers were already reaching for the next star when you caught my hand, literally in the cookie jar, and sternly (as sternly as you could get) made me promise I would only open them one at a time. On days when I was feeling especially down, however, you said that I was allowed to open one more - but just one! - as a pick-me-up.

I opened twenty-seven the day you left.

I originally intended to open them all up and mirthfully scorn all these lies that the stars have become. But then I realized I needed them. Because I realized that everything you've written down in those stars were pieces of me, pieces that you didn't and couldn't take with you when you left. The things that made me - me - were there before you and will be here after. 

In the midst of the wreckage and strips of unraveled paper stars around me, I came to this realization. I gathered up all the unopened stars and put them back in the jar. I intended to still open one a day as a reminder it now serves that who I am is inconsequential of who I am with. 

The coffee does smell delicious this morning.