I was ten years old and under my skin a galaxy was growing.
My mother called me from the window of the gray apartment block,
and I counted the veins on the back of my hand
like rivers running
toward a heart as large as all of Bucharest.
In the biology textbook,
the drawing of a cell
looked like the map of my neighborhood:
the nucleus was the square,
the membrane was the iron fence
I crossed every afternoon
into the other world,
the one behind the apartment blocks,
where rusted sheds hid
insects the size of a palm,
with wings of translucent paper
through which you could see,
as through stained glass,
childhood flowing through me.
At night,
my brain opened like an old book,
and in it someone wrote,
in letters of chalk,
the story of a little girl
who dreamed
a sky full of butterflies
with wingbeats the size of a breath.
And what else can a little girl dream
but to carry
in the pocket of her dress
a small planet,
twin to her own heart?
But to walk barefoot
across the roof of the world
and be afraid
of neither the dark
nor the years
entering her life
like the last trains into a station?
She dreamed her bones were turning to glass
and through them passed
all the evening light,
just as,
in every lit window,
another child dreamed the same dream,
and every window was an eye
through which the same light
looked back at her,
the same little girl,
the same galaxy
growing, growing
beneath the same thin skin.
And one day
the galaxy stopped growing.
The little girl woke up a woman.
Only the anatomy had changed.
The dream
still had the same heart.
©Corina Junghiatu