The Distance Between Stars
The doctors said she was healing.
Which, according to the stack of laminated handouts and the twice-a-week group sessions, meant she was “experiencing emotional regulation and linear thought restoration.” It did not, however, mean that she could explain to her mother why she stared at the ceiling for three hours that morning, counting the holes in the acoustic tile and trying to remember if stars screamed when they died.
Nora didn’t say that out loud. Not anymore.
Instead, she said, “Better,” and everyone clapped a little inside.
Her room smelled like plastic and lemon-scented floor wax, and when the night nurse turned off the lights, it was so dark Nora sometimes forgot she existed until she blinked. She’d started keeping a cheap penlight under her pillow, the kind they use to check pupils. Sometimes she’d flick it on and hold it to her palm to remind herself — yes, still here.
Still here.
She didn’t remember much about the day they brought her in. Just the sound of her mother’s voice breaking like cheap porcelain, and the technician’s latex gloves brushing against her wrist, firm but kind. Someone had told her, gently, “We’re going to keep you safe for a little while.”
She wasn’t sure what “safe” meant anymore. Sometimes it felt like silence and Jell-O cups. Sometimes it felt like being wrapped in invisible cellophane — contained but translucent, like people could see her but not touch her.
On the third Tuesday of her second stay, Nora met Hana.
Hana was a paper matchstick of a girl, all elbows and poetry, with calloused fingertips and a laugh that sounded like wind chimes made of broken things. She wore her hospital bracelet like a protest banner and carried a spiral notebook she refused to let anyone read. Nora liked her immediately.
They started sitting on the floor by the vending machine after dinner. That’s where the light was gentlest. They didn’t talk much, not at first. Just sat with their backs to the wall like guards watching a battlefield.
One night, a soda can from the vending machine got stuck and Nora instinctively hit the side of the machine with her palm. Hana watched with solemn reverence.
“You ever think we’re like that?” she asked. “Trapped in the middle of falling, waiting for someone to smack the machine?”
Nora almost smiled. “I think I’m the soda stuck behind another soda.”
Hana laughed. “Yeah. But I bet you’re a weird flavor. Like peach cola or something they only make in Japan.”
“Limited edition sadness,” Nora said, dryly.
They kept sitting. The hum of the fluorescent lights above them filled the silence like static.
“Do you think stars know when they’re dying?” Nora asked.
Hana didn’t laugh. She rarely did at questions like that.
“I think they don’t care,” she said, “as long as they get to burn all the way through.”
Nora nodded like she understood. Maybe she did. Maybe that was the whole problem.
She’d once described her depression as a galaxy that had lost its shape. Everything still spinning, but nothing holding center. They wrote it down on her intake notes as “persistent major depressive disorder with dissociative features.” She wrote it down in her own notebook as: I forgot how to be a person.
The therapists liked metaphors. Brains as gardens. Recovery as mountains. But Nora didn’t feel like soil or stone. She felt like a hallway light with a short circuit — flickering without warning. Still technically working. Still broken.
She didn’t remember the night she stopped eating, not exactly. It wasn’t sudden, just a slow slip — bite by bite, meal by meal, until her clothes hung off her like ghost skin and her mother wept into the telephone. Nora only remembered feeling clean, in that sterile, godless way that pain sometimes masquerades as purity.
When Hana caught her skipping dessert, she didn’t scold. She held out a piece of her own chocolate bar and said, “Just try it. It tastes like the dark before a thunderstorm.”
Nora took it. It tasted like a memory she hadn’t earned yet.
There was a rumor that Hana had tried to jump off the roof before they installed the new security locks. Nora never asked. She figured if a person wanted you to know their worst moment, they’d hand it to you wrapped in something softer. Like a joke. Or a poem. Or a half-melted chocolate square.
They had group therapy on Wednesdays. The kind where they sat in a circle and pretended truth could be wrung out like a sponge. One boy named Jeremy cried every week. A girl named Lis said nothing at all. The therapist would nod meaningfully and jot things on a clipboard. “Very brave,” she would say. “Thank you for sharing.”
Nora never spoke. She felt too full of ghosts to make space for her own voice.
But after one session, Hana slid a folded note into Nora’s pocket. It said:
sometimes surviving feels like betrayal
sometimes staying means sitting in fire
but that’s okay
you’re allowed to stay anyway
One night, they sat outside for fresh air hour, wrapped in thin blankets like exiles. The sky was too bright from the city to see real stars, but Nora tilted her head back anyway.
“I used to think if I died, I’d turn into starlight,” she said.
“You still could,” Hana said.
“No. Not anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t burn bright enough.”
Hana looked at her for a long time, then said: “It’s not about brightness. It’s about distance. Stars only look small because they’re far away. Doesn’t mean they’re not massive.”
Nora blinked hard. There were tears forming, and she hadn’t planned on them.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said, quietly. “To the world.”
“You don’t have to. Not all at once.”
“And if I can’t do it at all?”
“Then you’ll stay. Until the world bends a little to meet you.”
They didn’t talk after that. Just leaned into the cold. A nurse coughed politely from the edge of the patio when time was up.
Later that night, Nora found a folded paper crane on her pillow. Written on the wing: still burning.
It wasn’t signed, but it didn’t need to be.
Two weeks later, Hana was discharged. She left behind the crane, a pack of strawberry gum, and a note that read, in all lowercase letters: “your name is in the sky somewhere.”
Nora didn’t cry. She just stared at the ceiling. One day, she’d get out too. She didn’t know if she’d be ready. But she would carry this: the truth that healing was not a return to who you were, but a reimagining. A new gravity.
The ceiling tiles above her bed each had tiny pinholes, a speckled pattern, uneven and strange.
If she stared hard enough, they looked like constellations.
And so she named them.
And so she began.
