Gold Ceiling

My friend, T., lost her mother to cancer several years ago. I wanted to make her something: a tiny square of gold foil suspended from a string. “Tape it to the ceiling so it hangs over you you while you sleep,” I wanted to explain.

When my mother was gravely ill some years ago, I felt like there was no roof over my head. Just an open chute of black space filled with cold stars. She was my ceiling, a limit I could bump up against and then fall back to earth. I thought about T. lying in her bed, gazing into the abyss. All I could offer was single tile in a mosaic that would take a lifetime to fill in. If ever.

I didn’t give T. the tile. I imagined her waking to the nighttime cries of her young children and getting caught in the string. Or having to explain the dangling foil to a perplexed sibling. So then and now, I imagine it into her room, especially on nights when I, too, need a ceiling. There she is in the dark, looking up, just like me. The cracks in the plaster appear: a canceled job, a tragedy in the news, an eerily warm December. “Have a good night,” busy people say to each other in the evening, and in the morning, “Have a good day.” The send-offs hover, then pull towards the roof.

All the while, I’ve become a ceiling, too. My children’s sleeping breath blows me, their tiny gold square, back and forth like a pendulum. “Everything’s all right, you can go back to bed,” I tell them after a nightmare, just as my mother told me. As her mother told her. In the morning, if sun glints off the foil, it means the ceiling became a satellite. Someone was brought back from the reaches of space, drawn into a safe orbit, and deposited home.