In the crevice of my cornea, I hid a secret. A girl. She was twelve and crying in a science fair bathroom because her taupe glass jupiter exploded due to thermal shock.

They told her time was linear. An unidirectional superfluid. She folded it into a Möbius strip and wore it on her wrist. She sketches Roche limits, wondering why everyone close to her tidally dissipates.

She scavenged for words that completed her. She skinned them to their esophageal lining, hoping to find something. Concrete. Material. Substance. Meaning.

She bathes in methane lakes, rippling around her supple human skin. Ionised hydrogen from the chromosphere of Proxima Centauri pooled in the caldera of her tongue. It tasted like petrichor. Diesel. Raspberry ice cream. Home. Where is it? What is home? Home is in the blood gashes on her arms after a meteor shower. In the textured residue of his lips. In the blood curdling screams of help. That nobody heard.

Her home is Enceladus. In the thermal ocean, under the polychromatic layers of saccharine ice. A crusty cobalt popsicle that bursts into a myriad of microbial life. She is a trilobite there, dancing with the phytoplanktons. She respires dimethyl sulphide and leaves traces of life.

She is colossal now. Glut of fire and plasma, she strips her skin layer by layer. She catalyzes from hydrogen to helium to neon to silicon. And there is light that photodissociates her into neutrinos. And suddenly she is folding inwards to a point mass of neutron star density. Shrinking clay and keratinocytes. Condensing. Truncating like a coda in an intergalactic symphony. Condenses to the point of explosion.

Bursting shockwaves and dead bodies of planets and gold and uranium. She is the iron that flows in your blood. The oxygen in your trachea. The dust that coalesced into the moon. In her death she gave. Hoping. Hoping someone in this expanding cosmos will find her. Cremate her decalcified bones. And remember the star that was once a girl.

A girl on fire.