The Same Moon

Kia’s new home was very far from her old one — so far that the aeroplane had dinner AND breakfast on it, so far that when it was morning here, it was already night at Nani’s house.

The new street had different trees. The new school had different songs. Even the rain sounded different on the new roof. And Nani — who had lived one floor down for Kia’s whole entire life, close enough to smell her cooking — was now a face on a screen that sometimes froze mid-laugh.

“I don’t like it here,” Kia told the screen one evening, in a small voice. “Everything is different. Nothing came with us.”

Nani was quiet for a moment. Then she leaned close to her camera, the way she used to lean close for secrets.

“Nothing came with you? Kia. Go to your window. Right now — I’ll wait. Tell me what’s in the sky.”

Kia carried the phone to the window. Over the strange rooftops, above the different trees, there it was — big and round and golden.

“The moon.”

“Ah,” said Nani. “The moon. Not a moon. Kia — look carefully. Does it look like a new moon they gave you at the new place?”

Kia looked. It looked… exactly like always. Round and gold with the soft grey smudges that Nani had always said were the moon’s own rangoli.

“It’s the same one,” Kia said slowly.

“The very same. There is only one, you know. The whole world shares it — there isn’t a corner of anywhere that gets a different moon.” Nani turned her own camera to her window, and there, over the old familiar water tanks, hung the moon — her moon, Kia’s moon, the exact same one, shining on both windows at once like a lamp in the middle of one enormous house.

“When you see it,” said Nani, “I see it too. A few hours apart, that’s all — it visits you first now, then it comes to me. So every night, you tell it something, and by morning it’s here, and I’ll collect your message. The moon has carried messages for grandmothers and grandchildren for ten thousand years. It has never once lost one.”

That night, Kia told the moon about the different trees.

The next night, about the new school’s songs, and the girl called Amaya who’d shared her crackers.

Night by night, the new place filled up with tellable things — and a strange thing happened to the strangeness. The new street stopped being the wrong street and became the street I tell the moon about. Home, it turned out, wasn’t a place that got left behind. It was a net, stretched wide across the whole world, held up by all the people who loved her — and the moon was one of its hooks, the highest one, the one that never moved.

Years later, when Kia was big, she still caught herself checking the sky on full-moon nights.

“Message for Nani,” she’d say quietly, out of ten thousand years of habit.

And the moon, which has never once lost one, carried it on.