Where the Starseeds
came from.

They arrived the way the best things do: unannounced, late, in the hush after the house has gone quiet. A sheet of Arches on the table. A jar of water catching the lamp. Ink, and a few colors I didn't choose so much as reach for. No plan. I have learned not to bring one. I only make room, and wait to see who comes.

Watercolor begins as water. You wet the paper and the color sets off on its own, blooming past the edge of the stroke, following the grain of the sheet the way a river follows a valley, settling in places you never pointed it toward. Then the ink arrives, and the ink is the naming. A line for the brow. A mark for the mouth. The small, half-legible script that has become my handwriting, scattered across the page like something overheard. The water wanders; the ink tells it who it is. That is the whole of the method, and it has never once felt like mine alone.

Ten came that way, one at a time, across a few nights. Camillia, Wisteria and Primrose, wearing their flowers. Yuki, standing in a field where the word love grows wild. Mochi, mid-stride, already on her way somewhere. Sora, who is nothing but sky and the small creatures who live beneath it. Pip, Sweetberry and Iris. And Sometimes, who told me her name and would not say more.

I call them Starseeds because that is how they felt: seeds of light, loosed from somewhere very far away, drifting down through the dark until they found wet paper and took root. I did not make them so much as receive them.

There are only ten. Ink and watercolor on Arches paper, seven inches by ten, each signed by my hand, each the only one of her kind, each leaving with a certificate that carries your name. They will not be painted again. You don't choose. You claim your place, and when your name is drawn, the draw decides which Starseed was always meant to find you.