Beneath the Starlight, My Family Fell Apart

“Dad said the starry-sky lamp was my magic force field.

So why is the force field still here, while our home has fallen apart?”

When Chen Yu was eight, her galaxy shattered into shards of glass.

A divorce tore apart a marriage and shattered her vocabulary. “Going home” became “going to your mom’s,” and “Dad’s scent” became the smell of unfamiliar perfume. She marked crosses on the calendar and was pulled apart by four pairs of eyes in court, while the words “custody rights” became a kind of amputation certificate written on her body.

But children are weeds growing in the ruins.

She turned the crescent marks left by her mother’s fingernails into her own seal. She wrote the judge’s questions with a broken pencil, turning them into her childhood will. She forged the humiliating orange lollipop into a line of defense that would never break.

Years later, the starry-sky lamp shines once more.

Its source of light is her own heartbeat.

At last, she understands: being whole does not mean gluing the pieces back together as they were.

It means living as the source of light, illuminating every crack, where it came from and where it leads.

“I am not a flower growing from the ruins.

I am the light that illuminates them.”