Bitter Almonds

If there are people on the moon, do they look up in the night sky and say: ‘How beautiful the full earth is!’ or perhaps, ‘If there are people on earth, do they look up in the night sky and say...’

Often, when I was a whole lot younger and still made plenty of sense, I would stare at the moon and wonder if there was really a girl who lost her way, ending up on lunar ground, just like in the stories. My questions would almost always include: ‘How old is she?’, ‘Don’t she ever get lonely?’, and ‘How did she get there?’ (I knew I made more sense back then.) Adults that had the nerve to tell such a story would come up with a variety of statements that would make fictionists cringe and only give ambiguous information; seldom did they give the same answer to our questions twice so I assumed that nobody really knew, but it still made the Earth’s sole natural satellite less of a giant rock and more of an interesting heavenly body where a girl of unfathomable identity resides.

Was she a normal child who somehow found a way to breathe in outer space? Was she an off-spring of an alien species that looked exactly like humans? Was she an evil but totally awesome witch? Was she but a ghost? Was she (both literally and figuratively) an out-of-this-world creature? Did she ever feel envy when she saw us play to our hearts’ content? Did she ever want a friend to keep her company? Did Neil Armstrong and his colleagues find her when they first landed on Luna?

It was more than a tale to me. It was the mystery of the girl on the moon.

My cousins and I would talk about the latter for hours on end until they force us to go to sleep. They always seem to want to hear me spout random nonsense about the Apollo Moon Landing in relation with the girl and they always believed whatever I say, when in truth I was barely hanging on limited facts that I had twisted from what I’ve read on children’s encyclopedias and television. Back then, I didn’t even know the real meaning of the word ‘conspiracy’. I just knew how to spell it.

More than five years since she last came to mind and nothing changed: I still don’t know her name, and I still don’t know what she looks like. It doesn’t matter because I doubt I ever will.

I never believed in the existence of stout men who have unhealthy obsessions with chimneys, or reindeers with lightbulbs for noses, or even talking cats, but I did believe in girls with no sense of directions for them to end up on places less travelled without spaceships.

I once fell in love with the girl on the moon, and the funny thing is, as I desperately try to locate her whereabouts tonight, I thought it was just a phase.