Chapter One — The Light in the Distance

Every evening, when the sky began to darken, the girl would go to the window and look at the stars. She loved that hour, when the world slowly lost its colors and the distant lights began to appear, one after another, as though someone were lighting them just for her.

She never managed to count them all. Every time she tried, she lost count halfway through and had to start again. Sometimes she would choose one star and decide to watch it all evening, but after a few minutes another would catch her eye, bigger or brighter, and she would turn her attention to it without feeling that she had betrayed the first.

There was a small window in her room, with a bed opposite it, just high enough for her to sit on and look outside. In winter, she wrapped herself in a blanket up to her chin. In summer, she opened the window and let the breeze drift in. Sometimes she sat there so long that her legs went numb, and only then would she remember to move.

She especially loved the brightest stars, the ones whose light seemed steady and certain, as though nothing in the world could ever extinguish it. She paid less attention to the smaller stars. There were so many of them, crowded together and far away, that it was difficult to tell one from another. The brighter stars, on the other hand, seemed to have a place of their own in the sky, a place no one could take away from them.

Once, she asked why some stars twinkled more than others.

Someone explained that some were closer, some shone more brightly, and that the air between us and the stars could change the way their light appeared.

She listened, but the answer did not satisfy her. What she really wanted to know was why those particular stars had been chosen to be the biggest and most beautiful. Why the others had to settle for light so faint that sometimes they could hardly be seen at all.

No one seemed to think the question needed an answer.

I wouldn’t have known what to tell her then, either. Some questions seemed so simple that I couldn’t understand why she insisted on asking them. Today, I think perhaps she was asking something else entirely, something she simply didn’t yet know how to put into words.

But back then, she was a little girl, and the sky seemed much simpler to her.

In the mornings, she got up, dressed, and went about her day. She wasn’t a particularly sad girl, nor an unusually happy one. There were things she loved, things that annoyed her, days when she laughed for no reason, and days when she didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She loved drawing, although she could never get hands quite right, and she always left a few blank pages in every notebook in case something important suddenly came to mind.

She had friends, too. Not many, but enough that she didn’t feel alone. She loved listening to their stories, and sometimes she made up strange stories of her own that made them laugh. When she told a particularly funny one, she would start laughing before she reached the end and have to repeat the last sentence so everyone could understand.

She didn’t spend much time thinking about how she looked. In the morning, she would comb her hair in front of the mirror, check that there wasn’t a stain on her shirt, and move on. Sometimes she liked what she saw, sometimes she didn’t, but those thoughts rarely stayed with her for long. There were more interesting things to do.

Until she began looking at the stars during the day as well.

At first, it was nothing more than curiosity. She discovered that stars could be seen even when the sky wasn’t dark, if you knew where to look. Not the stars themselves, of course, but the light they chose to show the world. They appeared in little windows, in colorful pictures, on shiny surfaces she held close to her face. Everywhere she looked, beautiful faces waited for her, along with wide smiles, brightly lit homes, and people who seemed as though nothing unpleasant had ever happened to them.

She didn’t find any of this strange. After all, even the stars in the sky appeared only when darkness made them visible. Perhaps every star had its own hour when it chose to be seen.

Gradually, she began to recognize them. She knew who liked wearing white, who often changed her hair color, who traveled to distant places, and who was always photographed laughing. She knew what their rooms looked like, what clothes they wore, and which little objects they arranged beside them. Sometimes she knew what they had eaten for breakfast before she had even decided what she wanted to eat herself.

Some stars made her smile. Others stirred something in her that she couldn’t quite explain. She would watch them for a long time, close the little window in which they appeared, then open it again a few minutes later, as though something might have changed while she wasn’t looking.

Slowly, she began noticing things that had never bothered her before.

Her hair was one of them.

She had always thought it was perfectly fine. Sometimes it tangled, sometimes it became puffy after washing, and sometimes it simply refused to stay where she wanted it. But now she noticed that the stars’ hair almost never seemed to tangle. It fell exactly where it should, caught the light beautifully, and looked perfect even when the wind blew through it.

She tried arranging her hair the same way. At first, she simply brushed it a little longer. Then she experimented with moving her part, dampening a strand, and drying it again. One evening, she stood in front of the mirror for so long that she forgot what she had intended to do before going there.

Eventually, she pulled her hair into a ponytail and left the room.

No one noticed anything unusual.

Neither did she.

Around that time, she also became interested in makeup. She loved the colors and the tiny brushes, the possibility of changing something about a face with a single movement of the hand. At first, she applied a little mascara, just to see what her lashes would look like if they were darker. She leaned closer to the mirror, stepped back, blinked a few times, and smiled at her reflection.

She liked what she saw.

The next day, she put it on again.

Before long, she could barely remember how her eyes had looked before she started wearing mascara. Not because she had truly forgotten, but because she had grown so accustomed to seeing them differently that her natural appearance began to seem as though it were missing some small finishing touch.

It didn’t happen overnight.

Changes like that rarely do.

But the girl didn’t feel that anything inside her was changing. Quite the opposite. She felt she was discovering new things. She learned how to style her hair, how to choose clothes that suited her, and how to stand in the light so she would look her best. Sometimes she tried copying a gesture she had seen one of the stars make, only to burst out laughing at herself.

She still knew how to laugh at herself in those days.

One evening, while sitting on her bed watching the stars, she noticed a large cloud drifting across the sky. It covered part of her view. She waited for it to move, but the wind was weak, and the cloud seemed determined to stay where it was.

She grew irritated.

The star she had chosen to watch that evening was especially beautiful, and now she couldn’t see it. She moved closer to the window, as though changing the distance between herself and the glass might help, but the cloud continued to hide the light.

“Come on, move,” she whispered.

The cloud didn’t move.

Eventually, she gave up, lay back on her bed, and stared at the ceiling. She thought how unfortunate it was that there were so many clouds in the sky. To her, they seemed to have no color or shape of their own, drifting from place to place and hiding the very things that were most beautiful.

She didn’t think about the water that same cloud carried within it, or that somewhere far away, someone might be waiting for rain.

She wanted to see her star.

I remember that cloud more clearly than I care to admit. For a long time, I thought of it exactly as she did. Only later did I begin to wonder why something that was merely passing through the sky could trouble us so much.

But back then, we didn’t yet know how to ask that question.

The following morning, she stood in front of the mirror and studied her face. Her hair was neatly arranged, her mascara looked just right, and the shirt she had chosen matched her pants perfectly.

She looked good.

And yet, she remained standing there.

She tilted her head slightly to the right, then to the left. She tried smiling without showing her teeth, then smiled again with them showing. She stepped back from the mirror and leaned in once more.

Finally, she sighed.

There was no clear reason for that sigh. Nothing bad had happened. She hadn’t discovered a new flaw, heard an unkind remark, or remembered anything sad.

She simply felt that something was missing.

The feeling was so small that she could easily ignore it.

And she did.

She gathered her things and left the room, leaving behind the mirror and a question she didn’t yet know how to ask.

That evening, she returned to the window.

The sky was clear, and the stars shone with unusual brightness. She sat on her bed, tucked her legs beneath the blanket, and searched for her favorite star.

There it was.

Bright, beautiful, and far away.

She watched it for a long time. Then she lifted her hand to the glass, placing her fingertips on either side of the tiny point of light.

For a moment, it seemed as though she were holding the star between her fingers.

She smiled.

Then she lowered her hand, looked at it, and raised it toward the window once more.

This time, she didn’t smile.

She looked at the star, then at her reflection in the dark window, and finally whispered a question she had never asked before.

“Why don’t I shine like that?”

No one heard her.

And she had no way of knowing that, at that very moment, something small had shifted in the way she would see herself from then on.

The star continued to shine.

And the girl, who until that evening had only loved looking at it, began to wish she could be like it.

© 2026 Nurit Rozenblat. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without the author's prior written permission.