…The best road trips always have Wyoming or Montana in them—Big Sky Country—or Mexico’s high desert where the seven-thousand foot elevation is high enough to believe that every falling star might touch me on its descent to the sea. And though I have learned to cast toward the stars, I knew there were never mine to capture. Not like the Greeks: who built myths for each constellation, sent gods into the heavens to forever rest. Imprisoned and yet free. So no, there is no touching this: this astrocytoma—this star-tumor that grows and threatens my humanness, that moves in the gray matter like a serpent threatening to take away my life—that I too might turn to dust, to gas, and rise, held by my own gravity, to the heavens, where I will become my own star alive with myth.