Nights are usually quiet here. In watching the small villages and hamlets of the world, I have found a way to make the solitude a little less oppressive.
There were stars in her eyes, and I could never tell whether they were hers or a reflection of mine. His were always somber and empty, as if the light of his mind had slipped slowly from the leaking corners in the back of his skull where his concerns (and he had many) ate away at the edges of his being. She was an exuberant, wasteful creature. She bubbled like champange as she flited around him. I watched them as they took their nightly walks. She spoke at exhausting length and alarming speed of meaningless things. He said nothing of what he should have mentioned to her.
Tonight she walks alone, I notice, and her eyes are somber and empty.
Nights are usually long here. They settle, inky and slumberous, over the gables of the little houses. In the heavy dark of sleeping towns I find, in abundance, those with things to hide.
The young girl is afraid. I study her snarl as she passes strangers on the streets, I see her terror creep through. She catches the bus and rides for miles, watching hills, which are nothing but great, dark beasts to her, roll by out the window. When she arrives, she immediately finds a restroom, and disappears from my sight for a while. When she emerges, her hair is cropped short, and the color has changed. She catches another bus, and I watch until she passes out of my sight. I wonder what was hunting her, that she must shed her skin at every bus stop and glance too often over her shoulder.
I wonder what she did to make the devil chase her.
Nights are usually unfettered here. In the depths of the dark, dreams can fly. Most dream sleeping, and a few dream awake, sitting in the confines of their bedrooms, staring up at me.
The child is smaller than most his age, and he feels it in the bruises that run along his ribcage. He is in no danger now. We stare at each other for a long while, trying to unravel one other. Pulling back the layers of the moon, it seems, is a little harder than peeling back the layers of a boy. He likes the things that children his age do. He has a model rocket hanging from his ceiling, books on his shelves and clothes on his floor. Yet, I have to wonder what about the eyes of this child makes me stare back. Even as he slips from my fingers into the morning, I do not know.
-Musings of a Waning Crescent Moon on an Autumn Night // The Vagabond Queen
titsay
germansingergirl
jacobvanloon
dailybridgerton
dededos
