... so I am home now..., for Kimya
There is a familiar shadow breathing in the top left corner of the bedroom. Inhale nightlight patterns, exhale purple and blue and green-gold. Dream colors sink into your blankets so you wake up warm even when the heating has been broken for days.
When your lungs hold the light, your eyes can delight in the listening.
That is this creature.
They are small and they cling. They cling in a friendly way they cling like geckos playing with gravity like jump rope before dinner in the summertime. They are a prism. They take the one thing, that one last thing that makes you feel safe enough to fall asleep and they project it across the horizon in more than our rainbows, in colors only birds can see.
They are a friendly old sentinel. This animal has seen stuffed animals and photo frames and posters and guitar stands dance around the room, waltz in and out and into obscurity or childhood legend. They live in many small rooms across the world at once. Weaving the smallest secrets into an extra dimension of space for you to grow into. Many, many animals take up space in beautiful ways. We rarely see one for whom it is a by-product.
This animal was born curled up, huddled in a litter and it remembers this in the figures crowded into the bedroom some nights at the end of a party. Gentle lamplight still dancing on the walls and someone you had a crush on dreaming of a pirate ship smashing through the wall to take us all on an adventure. This animal thinks, remembers, concludes family is the people you choose to come with you. So they don't mind being adopted all alone. Sometimes going with is also simply waiting for you to get back. Still, they are just beginning.
When someone goes to bed alone, this creature sings. This is rare. We usually have ourselves to sing us to sleep and thoughts to spill over our quilts and comforters and into the dusk, littering the street. Sometimes, one of us goes to bed truly alone. Something has gone quiet or was worn out of us and we cannot keep ourselves company.
When this happens, the size of the room no longer matters. They cling Deep. Our research indicates that to them, it feels like digging their toes down into warm beach sand. They dig into the empty space and they find you in your alone room. So now it is not an alone room. Now they are singing in all the spaces and you can sleep. Even those of us who are no longer sure what is and is not alone.
We thought we might name them after a constellation, but it turns out we all call them different things. Who knew. For an adoption agency in an uninhabited galaxy, our navigation charts are excitingly disparate.
You can name this creature. Again and again and again, if you like. Names slip off like gecko tails to feed hungry strangers. Each one grows in different.
