When the moon was bright and receding in fullness, I swear I spoke to a gathering of stars.
It was Orion. Tall and beautiful as I remembered him, woven out of the Milky Way and the glittering distance etched in dissonance; twinkling, atmospheric.
I asked him how he was. Dead, he told me. Dead and long gone. I thought I’d hallucinated it, you see--the way people see stars, up close. It’d been a long day, after all. Halloween has always made me skittish, and today was no exception. Something in the air tasted wrong. It was old and dirty and vaguely bloody; the way the world tasted when your face found soil too suddenly.
I’d taken some things to cope with the situation, so--my head wasn’t exactly on straight. None of me was. The world felt fluid and I wanted to slip away with it, down a drain and into the gutter, or vice versa. Whichever came first, honestly. Everything had abruptly become too exhausting. Anxiety does that to a person. It’s taking a grindstone to the last nerve in your system and scraping it to sharp alertness at all times; constant vigilance, and all that comes with it. Makes for a very brittle, easily-exhaustible nerve, that.
He always had. Tall and radiant and magnificent. It was no wonder my lady had woven him into the stars. She had stitched his spirit into the heavens and embroidered his glory with diamonds. She had shot his soul into the atmosphere like a pistol going off; like a firework. It was her farewell symphony; it was her cannon. It was the dirge of a fallen hero, and I heard it in my sleep for centuries.
Just as I held his eyes in my mind, darker than they were now, as made of stars when I needed a place to hide. I hid myself in dark eyes and dark places and waited for the day to end. Harsh was the day; with Apollo’s rays chasing me and mine down fields and through valleys, his chariot flying after us with fiery wheels. Harsher was the night; but more livable, too. The moon’s arrows were always gentler. More fatal; yes, but gentler was the cold white brush of death that was the moonlight. Softer were the sprinkling of faraway stars.
I held a handful of stardust. I beheld a man who told me it was alright to let go. That while he’d never cared for me the way I cared for him, he still looked down and saw me.
He’d always looked down and seen me.
I tried to joke, to say it was easy when I was so much shorter than he. But he held my face in glimmering hands and told me to value myself. To not be alone. To not feel isolated.
The rest is a blur--I asked if he found my goddess; was she with him now. No, he said, and other things hence--but I woke an hour later in a pumpkin patch with a slamming headache and ash on my hands.
A burnt out cigarette, perhaps.
The graveyard is full of ghosts, but I am not afraid of ghosts.
Ghosts make the world less lonely.
Be they stars in the heavens above or misty passersby here on Earth.
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