The Pleiades

Adrianne Alvarez-Jackson
1 min readJan 13, 2022

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The 7 Sisters

The view over the hilltop home was a farewell to day, Bright as a supernova: Resplendent orange bursting juice across the horizon. She was a fortune teller signaling the end of something but I wasn’t listening.

It was my birthday and we were posh as the women we used to admire walking along Michigan Avenue in the summer sun. Golden as the shine of Pam Livingston’s hair-she was prom queen and every queen at my high school.

You and I had been girls together and now we were celebrating my 50th. I often think that if I died and someone went through my things they might think we had been lovers. A 30 year friendship will do that. And yet there was no charge between us-no pull towards the dance floor. Maybe in a past life but not today. Not that day by the pool in the sun. Or any of the days before. Just wonderfully earthy, filial warmth.

I often wish we could have been like those sister stars though- two twins in the Pleiades, there’s so much forever in sky.

Down here-too much disappointment in dirt and I don’t know if we’ll ever make it to the Camino.

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Adrianne Alvarez-Jackson

Adrianne is an artist-educator whose writing explores her offbeat life; its traumas, victories, cultural ambiguities and the intersectionality of it all.