God used to smoke cigarettes
Ever since she quit
She wakes up shaking in the middle of the night
Searching for any celestial snack that may subside the cravings
Sometimes she stumbles upon a moon or two
Crunching them between her teeth like giant chunks of chalk
Trapping moon dust in the corners of her mouth.
Sometimes she finds flying comets, even whole planets.
But planets have too many textures that can be a bit overbearing for a midnight snack.
Eventually
God tried eating the stars
but they would simply tumble around in her mouth
Unable to be chewed or crushed
Instead, the invisible mouth was only able to mush some of the light around
Making the star shine brighter in some areas than others
She longs to taste the stars.
But she knows she never can
She created them to be inedible even to the most godliest of beings
She knew even the most perfect soul in the universe wouldn’t deserve the delicious faultless flavor of the stars
No one deserved it.
Black holes can remodel their flawless taste but only because no one could ever reach into its depth of spacetime to get it back.
Even so
She sleepwalks in the middle of the night
Going from star to star
galaxy to galaxy
Gnawing on every star in case one might budge
As if biting an indestructible stress ball
She could squish it and misshape it in the slightest
But it would only make the star more beautiful
Making them flash and flicker
Dazzling the spectators on planets lightyears away.
Veronica Barboza's personal essay won first prize in the Eleventh Annual Humanities & Sciences Undergraduate Writing Contest. Veronica is majoring in Film at the School of Visual Arts.