On the day you were taught what a metaphor was, the test to confirm your understanding of the topic: How is snow like a mother’s love? You jot down answers at breakneck speed, wanting to be the fastest with the most right answers. You don’t get to read yours out loud. No one does. And anyway, if it were really a test, you would’ve failed because twenty years later it hits you after an argument about how you ended up like you, why you can’t be like xyz, and you don’t have a good answer except you never thought you were strange, after all your mom is exactly the same. Stifled by the implication that gravity was upside down, you walk out the door into a chilly night in January, look up at the stars like seeds once dipped in glitter to see the first snowflake drift by, alone and unsure as a baby deer on a highway. It keeps falling and never touches the ground but when you wake up the next day, the ground has been covered by a layer of stardust reconfigured as snow.