The mistery of Haruna's Star - 40 first chapters

25

Since Haruna kept asking me for my phone so she could listen to her beeps, I gave it to her and bought myself another. She's also started to use the telescope again. Consuelo gave her a small book on the names of the 88 constellations and she's learned them by heart. I've been teaching her to read for the past few days and Haruna learns so quickly, I can't help but feel proud. Even when it's very late, she picks up a book and asks me to read something to her and teach her new words. I pick words at random such as "clay" and she examines it with her magnifying glass so she can see it more clearly. I tell her that ceramics are made of clay and write the word "ceramics" in a small chalkboard, the same one my mother taught me to read with. Consuelo and I tried calculating how often Haruna has a "birthday".

I say every four days, but she says it's every five. It's really hard to have a precise measurement. If she becomes a year older every four days, she'll live 91.25 years. If she does it every five days she'll live to be 73. All this is fairly relative. She could reach 90 years of age and age gracefully, only looking 60 or 70, so I've decided not to trouble myself with it. At last Consuelo and I decided to celebrate her birthday at the end of each month. We even agreed to give a unit of time to Haruna's age: a stellar year, consisting of a month.

At first it was sad to think that my daughter would only live 12 stellar years. Consuelo chided me, saying it was just because I wasn't used to knowing a child like her, which is true. Then I started growing used to a being like Haruna having 12 cycles of life. I could write about the characteristics of each one. The first cycle, for example, would be the one in which it develops a structured language, learns to walk, write and draw. "This is the cycle in which a stellar child tells its mother not to be afraid" I imagined myself typing on my laptop. Only then did I contemplate the possibility of other kids like Haruna. A world full of stellar kids that lived 365 days and entertained themselves by burying crystals in the ground to create advanced ecosystems.