The Different Sizes of Infinity by Jessica A.

Today, I traded places with the sun. My body, once small and fleshy became warm and
powerful and infinite. I was, all at once, struck with an intense sense of self-importance — not the arrogant, all-consuming kind, but rather the beautiful maternal kind, wherein your love for the people who need you becomes the preeminent purpose in life.

Without regret, I stripped off and lavished parts of my own essence for some profound, transformative meaning: warmth, sight, life itself. I basked in this exquisite gravitas, and could not help but feel disgusted with my own human body; so weak. Reliant.
Insignificant.

I fooled myself that my envy was admiration, and I thought to the sun, in all her undeniable majesty:
‘Whilst you are burning so impossibly bright, creating a transcendent display of heat and light and meaning, I am but a mere flash on the timeline of incredible events in your lifetime.

Tell me, how do I place meaning to existence when everything eventually fades into inconsequential nothingness? What is the point to life if, by death, I have not myself altered the universe?’

She did not answer.

Yet when I returned home and my own mother caught me crying at my lack of remarkable brightness, I couldn’t help the superlative warmth I felt as she stroked my cheek — flesh against flesh, so beautifully, singularly human — and told me that I will rattle the stars in my own extraordinary way because, for her, I was always going to be the sun.