fallow down the moon

Riding a train through the mountains, the moon shines bright and full. It's a cold night and I am sitting next to someone who isn't my lover, but something more real than that. Our laughter cuts loud through the air. We have to shout to hear each other; the sight of the moon makes my whole body sing.

Sometimes in the full cold of winter, the ice bows around the moon have brought me to my knees.

Once, I was falling in love with a person and falling in love with the moon at the same time. I was often very far away from the person I was in love with. I saw the moon much more than I saw them. I watched it wax and wane in the night sky like pages dropping from a calendar. Back then, I was running on a steady diet of love letters, wishes, and introspection. I grew thin, but electric. Falling in love is that weird mix of hormones and magic and the moon is that weird mix of astronomy and magic and when you see its face, you know that you are very small and very lucky, which is what love can feel like as well.

Later, with my heart broken, I felt alienated and lonely from the moon. The turn from full to new reminded me of what had been nurtured and then lost. Its magic was untouchable and it was hard to connect through the veil of my own longing. While I had fallen in love with a human, I had also fallen in love with the mist around the trees, cold water at night, the latin names of forest plants, and the moon over the mountains. I felt like I had lost the ability to love wildly, all these dark forests and moonlit skies.

I left again and in the desert, I watched clouds pass gently across the face of the moon. I watched it rise over the Border, casting light across the river and the fence. I watched the moon's cycle on long nights awake attending births. I was learning to measure dilation with my fingertips. I was learning to respect the magic of things that are meant to grow and wither. The moon is said to inspire madness and dictate menstrual cycles. Some said the full moon broke the waters, some said the new. I asked an astronomer, he said it only controlled the tides. Our bodies aren't big enough to be affected by tidal cycles in this way. Sure enough, though, the next new moon brought everyone in with broken waters. Every room full, we slept in the kitchen.

Awake most nights, I saw the moon bright and clear above Juarez and El Paso, shining light on family members separated by the State. Moonlight crosses borders, ignoring nations, knowing it was here before them. The same moon that lit the paths of ancestors and has lived in stories across cultures for as long as we have had cultures, and stories.

In this way, I felt the moon return to me. Like the moon itself, the pathways I followed out of heartbreak, out of loss, out of disillusionment weren't new, they were old and familiar and luminous.