When I was younger, I used to talk to her, my Cassiopeia. I could see her in my mind from the first time I saw those stars. She looks like me, but better, prettier. She’s perfect. A lot of the kids at school had imaginary friends back then. I had an imaginary mother.

It was never like that for Max and Michael, especially not Max. Michael needed a family, true, but he’d never made one up. Probably because he couldn’t even imagine the kind of love they could provide him with. At any rate, they never really needed someone else, not really. They, after all, had each other.

They looked out for me over the years, protecting their little sister. But, I wasn’t really their equal, included as a friend, until just recently. I’ve never told them about my Mother who watches over me at night. She was mine and mine alone. Something, the only thing I’d never have to share with them.

I’ve climbed up onto my roof most every summer night since I was 7-years-old to watch her climb through the sky and dream she was looking down on me. I fall asleep up here a lot, feeling at home with her watching over me.

Tonight I look to her with an understanding I’ve never had before. Most nights when I came out here it was to watch her rise. It never occurred to me that, at some point during the night, she left the northern skies. Tonight’s different. Tonight I’m here to watch her set.

It’s my seventeenth birthday today and I’ve finally found my strength. Reality is big and scary and something it’s time I faced. I can’t cling to the imaginary anymore. I turn my head slightly as I hear Max knock on my bedroom door, back in the house.

“I’m on the roof,” I yell down and a few moments later he hoists himself up to join me.

“You come up here often?” He asks curiously as he sits next to me.

“Every now and then,” I tell him, not taking my eyes from my beautiful Cassiopeia, “I come to think.”

He pauses for a long moment, his eyes scanning the sky and I know his thoughts before he voices them.

“Do you think about our parents?” He asks. I watch silently as the last of Cassiopeia falls beyond the horizon.