Archive of Our Own

No one knows when it started.

Some evenings, in the cradle between sleep and wakefulness, you remember fragments of memories that aren’t yours, old faces and strange, hypnotizing melodies that you forget as soon as you make a conscious effort to focus on them. They echo in your mind for hours after, unsettling lullabies, postponing sleep until you feel like you’ve been awake forever. Though the lyrics elude you, the feeling lingers- that sense of wonder and awe that ripples through you whenever you’re faced with something that’s been here for thousands of years before. It’s not the majesty of old ruins and monuments that fascinates you so. It’s the feeling that overcomes you in those moments- for a second, you feel as ancient as they are, like a fragment of yourself has seen worlds being shaped into existence and unfolding before you even opened your eyes.

Maybe that’s why you keep going there.

It’s a smooth climb to the top of the hill, but the road there is a spiral instead of a direct path, so you end up walking about five times more than you should. Mystery; a quest, perhaps, to reach a place that not many can reach; these were the first thoughts that crossed your mind the first time you came here, drawn by the unexplainable appeal of a tall hill at the edge of a city that’s only plain and straight roads. There is vegetation you’ve never seen or heard about before, flowers in the form of violet spheres that shatter as soon as you touch them, undulating grass, vines that crawl across the ground as perfect spirals. You’ve googled them to find out what they are, but as soon as you sat down to write their description, words fell away from you like leaves from a vine, letting your mind a comfortable blank. You’ve tried photographing them, but every attempt only left you with white light on film instead of the image you were trying to capture.

No one knows when it started, maybe because no one ever talks about it. You think no one is really able to.

The monument on the top of the hill isn’t a monument, not quite, and if it is, you don’t know what it stands for. An egg-shaped stone the size of a small building, made of transparent quartz, a perfect shape with a myriad of patterns as its veins. You can’t look straight at it when the sun is too bright or when it’s terribly cloudy, as if it doesn’t stand anything but moderation- but when you’re allowed to truly see it, you feel like the whole world has shrunk itself to that small point in space and time, leaving you hollow and in utter, mind-shattering bliss.

There are always others there, sitting cross-legged in front of it or lying down on their backs with their faces to the sky, their eyes blank and their expressions devoid of any tension. You wonder if that’s how you look, too, when you end up spending an entire afternoon there, thinking it was only an hour; when you feel yourself slip away, hypnotized and transparent, traversed by a feeling that not even the most crafted writer could turn into words. If it wasn’t for them to remind you that you exist in this space and in this time, their silent presence pulling you back to earth, you don’t think you would ever come back.
There are always at least two others there; maybe that’s why you haven’t heard of anyone going mad yet, their mutual presence pulling them back to reality, even though it seems virtually impossible that the stone is never left unsupervised. Sometimes you wonder what it would look like then, when no one is watching it, when it has no observer to shape its form and transfer its energy to. Other times, you wonder whether the thoughts you leave with are truly yours or if they’re expressions of a feeling as old as the world itself, pouring through the stone and into you, embracing you with folds of white.

Today, you follow the road there slowly, almost reverently, feeling the spheric eye of the sun guide your every move, the soft earth forming unknown maps on the soles of your feet. You’ve had a tough week. Your father was finally called as a soldier in what they call the First Celestial War- nothing more than an immense proof of human ignorance in the form of attacking the unknown, as far as you’re concerned-, your sister got depressed over some boy and sat in her bed until moss started crawling up her ankles, something that the petty doctor said was `one of the most astounding displays of love he’s ever seen’, and you were torn between the desire to finish building your 3D model of the Mayan ruins and the responsibility to help your mother demolish the second floor of your house, the one that belonged to your father. Neither of you said anything, but you both know he is not coming back.

It’s a relief to finally be alone, not needed to stifle the herratic pattern of your thoughts anymore, now that reality has agreed to be left alone for a little while. It feels timeless, being here, like dipping your fingertips into cold water on a torrid day, like looking in the eyes of someone who has seen the stars. It’s crowded today: an old woman laying down with her face to the sky, a child sitting cross-legged dangerously close to the stone- for a moment you mistake him for a prism, reflecting a myriad of colours from the sun to the stone and back- a tattered man, hunched by the trials of life, a young, exceptionally beautiful woman and a scrawny boy about your age, sitting in your usual place, closest to the edge of the platform. The stone makes them all look the same, human artifacts trapped in the here and now, barren of their boisterous individuality. You sit down somewhere between the old woman and the boy, with your back to the abyss below, and you breathe.

You awake hours after, with the sun slowly melting down on the sky behind you. Equally dazed and sober, you stumble up to your feet and start your way down, catching a last glimpse of the child and the boy, the only witnesses left, before you fade out of the stone’s view. You find the boy particularly alluring- the symmetry of his face, the calculated intensity of his eyes, the way his dark hair absorbs all the colours of the sun- and you decide to call him Sollux, an appropriate contradiction to the darkness he seems to emit.

The next day, on your way home, you stop by the local office to collect the Daily Award for being outside your mind for more than ten hours at a time. By the time you get home, you can feel yourself slip in the straining confines of your thoughts again, the silent detachment fading away in a symphony of worries, none of which have any correspondent in real life. When you were younger, you were afraid that, if your mother knew about your mind, she would give you away. Now you have grown used to the idea that she quite needs you to stay.

You think of Sollux, repeating his name in your mind: Sol-lux, like you are a child learning a word for the first time. You’ve had people before, but you never cared enough to tend to them. You wanted to watch them grow, but instead they wilted before your eyes with an ill affection that you never required. `There is something about you,’ Vriska had said, `don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. The way you carry yourself like you don’t belong here, the halo of smoke around your head and the way your eyes look at the world like it’s a stranger that you keep meeting for the first time, again and again. They think they can find something in you and mold it to their own wishes. But I know better. You’re empty.’ You’d just nodded and let your eyelids fall and keep falling, down on your face and into the coffee cup, until she woke you up and made you into yourself again. You never thought much about her words, whether she was right or just pretending to know, like she used to do with everything. You only know that you don’t remember ever being different.

So naturally, you don’t want to think of him too much, because he will notice and he will become enchained, and the responsibility of it was never something that you wanted to handle. You end up imagining the place where he lives (an old Victorian house at the outskirts of the city, with his glass room gracefully misplaced on the second floor), the things he likes to do (programming, apiculture, writing, even though no one but his family knows about the last two), his daily routine (coffee no sugar, staying inside all day except a window of two hours every evening for the bees and walking around the neighbourhood), and his friends (a grumpy, kind-hearted boy and a cheerful girl who is secretly in love with him). There is an entire world unfolding beneath your eyelids, and when the story is over you realize that you haven’t slept in more than two days.

You return to the quiet place, where the wish to see him settles down into the nuisance of it being fulfilled. He is watching the stone with the same intensity as before, stubborn focus where quiet awe should reign, and you reserve a moment for nothing else but pity for the violent ebb and flow of his mind, an oscillation so loud that it hits your body in full waves and rearranges your atoms into spiked stars. You head as far away from him as possible and eventually you settle on the opposite side of the stone, facing him, and end up distracted by the rays of light flowing from his eyes. The stone awaits in quiet jealousy, but its wonder is not able to carry you away from yourself this time and instead you are trapped in your body more heavily than ever, anchored to reality by the steadiness of his chaotic presence.

When you sit up to leave, he follows you, and the silent prayers that echo through your mind, no no no, don’t let him get close, the space around me is like a prison he couldn’t know , fall to abrupt silence when he speaks.

`Hey, you look strangely normal for someone who keeps coming here,’ he observes on a casual tone.

`What do you mean?’ you ask on monotone. He is closer to you now and you can feel the wave-like pattern that his atoms let out interfering with every single of your nucleotides. It feels like dark clouds and sharp lead and violent colour, all meant to cover an infinity of shadows.

`Well, most people who take their time to sit around a big chunk of stone and worship it until their eyes go blank can’t exactly be called normal, can they?’ he says.

`I suppose not,’ you say. ‘But neither can people who don’t.’

He smiles at you, a small, timid curl of the lips that only serves to further bring out the sparks in his eyes. `I’m Sollux,’ he says, extending his hand.

`Aradia,’ you reply, and the point of contact between your hands feels definitive, a signature of skin on skin that guarantees something that you are not quite aware of yet, something that you want to dismiss and desert in the middle of the farthest ocean, but that you somehow end up embracing, led by the same fascination that brought the stone to you, that nameless ache that, in your darkest nights, unwinds ancient memories from the fabric of your skin and brings them to overwhelming awareness.

His name is Sollux and he lives in the suburbs, on the top floor of an old Victorian house. He likes programming and everything related to computers. He takes his coffee with no sugar, but uses honey instead (how could you have missed that?). His friend, Karkat, is the most annoying prick he’s ever met, and Feferi is the sweetest girl in the world, and he tells you that tonight he is going to make a move on her. He talks a lot, he doesn’t let the silent spaces between you grow and he is absolutely passionate about everything he is saying. You walk through the sunset, dimly aware of the airships that you can only spot in the corner of your eye, and you end up gifting him words even though you’re aware how each of them melts in tendrils in the air between you and opens you up, something that you swore would not happen again.

Oh, well. You suppose there’s no turning back now.

You part with no agreement to meet again, even though he keeps trying to squeeze one out of you. You hover back to your room, shut the door and pull down the curtains, and start counting your cells with the desperate precision of a mad scientist, trying to find out a definitive pattern to them, something that will tell you how many grains of sand are left inside the glass before you are allowed to break free.

When you see him again, he’s stripped of his cheerfulness and brought down to a base pattern of soft, grey tendrils, ambiguous and intoxicating. The fire in his eyes has turned into muddy water. You both contemplate the stone with your elbows touching and your minds slipping into each other at a slow, steady pace, until his sadness encumbers you like a golden chrysalis and you feel safe, you feel at home. Afterwards, he tells you that he’s bipolar; it is the first time you smile at him, in appreciation for the gift of both his confession and his sadness. You don’t tell him any of the things you are. You hope he will never find out.

`I applied for a space mission,’ he tells you when you are both sitting on a bench in the central park, sipping on lemonades and pretending to be normal people. `God knows why I did it, I was high on myself, thought I’m destined to save the human race or something. I kept imagining this scene where I come back home glorious and all the people who never believed in me are just staring in awe. The irony is, in my mind’s eye, I was the first among them.’

`Do you think we need to be saved?’ you ask.

`Well yeah, from ourselves.’ He pauses. ‘You know, I keep hearing these voices. Sometimes they come right before I fall asleep, sometimes they get inside my mind in the middle of the day, mashing with drug receipts and bits of code and whatnot, it’s awfully distracting. They’re peaceful, though, they’re trying to tell me something, but I just can’t grasp it. I think that whatever is out there, it’s not our enemy.’

You look at him, hypnotized by the way photons are dancing on the surface of his skin. His words affect you physically, like something lonely and tender and right has crawled through your marrow and is embracing your whole being from the inside, washing it in cold comfort. You wonder whether now would be the right time, the first time anyone could ever talk about the stone that all of you worship in mute awe every day, the unveiling of this strange and wonderful thing that found its home in the middle of the dun colours of your city, but the moment flows, and you are left behind, stubborn in your selfish ways.

`I feel like I’ve been here forever,’ you say for the first time, and it feels empty, like you are talking about someone else. `Like we’re all characters in a video game and as soon as it’s over, we’re going to resume being a part of whoever created us. I hear voices too, but they seem to be coming from here, from somewhere below our present time. Memories, songs, secrets. Things we should all know, but were made to forget. I don’t think they’re much different. Whoever they are, out there.’

Silence stretches between you as he presses his hand on top of yours, and for the briefest of moments, numbness dissolves into abrupt, painful awareness. Like the stone, yet a million times brighter and devoid of any sense of bliss. You are terrified of him and of all the ways he could bring you alive.

`I’m getting the answer tomorrow,’ he says. `To the application. ‘

`I think it’s a good thing that you applied,’ you say. He could be of help.

`Yeah,’ he replies, looking away. `Didn’t plan on sticking along with this life business for much longer, anyway.’

You turn your palm upwards and interlace your fingers with his and for a moment, cradled by your shared, ludicrous death wish, the creases in your palms slip into each other in a perfect puzzle, filling the empty spaces that you sometimes notice in the mirror, the holes that stain your hands transparent when you put them in the front of your eyes. He rests his head on your shoulder in bare surrender and it feels like being complete when you didn’t even know you needed something else but yourself, loneliness melted in the illusion of mutual understanding.

It’s better than anything else you’ve had. Behind your heads the void keeps opening, waiting.

The next weeks weave around you in slow, torturous spins, springing comfort out of shared moments of silence, accidental words, synchronized waves of thought. He comes over to your place to help when Damara has grown roots through the wooden floor of her room and you spend the entire day together, distracting her attention until she is almost able to move again. He looks at her with the same fascination that the doctor had- the everpresent lunacy of the romantic- and your stomach jumps, trying to warn you. Stay away, stay away.

You roam the streets together for hours, sometimes without paying any attention to where you’re going at all; you always end up in the same place that you started from. Sollux jokes that perhaps the space that the two of you inhabit has different, strange laws, and somehow you know better than not to take him seriously. He tells you about how he and Feferi are together now. Relief and jealousy wash over you in violent waves that you keep silent and subsided while your mouth is saying that you are happy for him, and you are surprised to find out that you really are.

Sometimes he tries to kiss you, but it’s always when he is his manic self, fueled by the same blindness that pushed him towards the stars. You turn your head away and dismiss it as just another gesture, another terribly human attempt to find something to fill the void.

He makes the contour of your days fill with colour, from dun grey to obnoxious rainbow splatter and even if the background is still a black void that inhabits you like it has found a home, it is satisfying to find that sometimes you can be free of it. Now your dreams are quiet unfoldings of mundane instead of the lurid terror of a separate reality, and you are learning more and more how to love the fragments of distant time that paint themselves behind your eyelids in the evening, sinking down at the frayed ends of your consciousness and letting go, letting go. You try to sing him one of the songs that always come to your mind, ethereal and hypnotic, and your voice turns to crystal before your eyes, clear and resonant, capturing all the things you never knew how to explain in words.

`You should try singing it when…’ he says, mesmerized. The way his sentence stops mid-way is eerily familiar, but at that moment, you don’t know what he was trying to say.

You keep visiting stone together, swept away by its mute mystery. You keep being unable to speak about it.

After a week of not hearing from him, your feet lead you to his house like it’s a road you have known for years, colours blurring around you as you float through the busy streets. You are tired, so, with something akin to apathy, you keep postponing the moment when you will face whatever it is inside you that always has you going back to him. You find him in his bed, motionless and empty-eyed, a perfect picture of static desolation. You think you could frame him like this, catch this moment into eternity and never let him move again, because motion is time and change and loss and you can feel that he has grown oh so tired. His nails have dug swirls on the inside of his palms and you can feel the rich scent of moss in the air, but you mention nothing as you lie down on the side of the bed and take his hand in yours, a futile, symbolic gesture of comfort.

`I wanted to tell you,’ he says and you are relieved to find that there is still emotion left in his voice. He looks at you; his eyes are blazing suns, you are blinded by the sudden change and the pressure of being its focus. `I got the letter of acceptance. For the mission. I’m leaving in a month.’

`That’s a lot of time,’ you say. He laughs- an ugly, bitter sound- and looks away. Outside, the temple bells are chasing the clouds away to a new destination and you can feel their pressure leaving you, inch by inch.

You manage to get him out of bed by the end of the day and you spend the evening in the adventure park, with cotton candy, bright lights and melancholy for a childhood you never had. You laugh together, a misplaced sound in the bubble of your despair, but in that moment the sound is clean and purifying, like all your worries have washed away in one dizzying rush of joy. It’s a feeling you dimly remember from the early days of your childhood; you feel old, too old to be happy, but right now- in some twisted, incomplete way- you are.

You watch the fireworks, explosions in the dark background of the sky; they blind you to anything else but awe for how vast this moment can be- this moment, every moment- despite the way the walls of your prison keep closing in on you, darkening the shared marrow of your days. You hold his hand because you know that you would spiral away into nothingness if you wouldn’t, ensnared by all the things that you can never know.

`It’s unfair, don’t you think?’ he tells you later, when you have retreated from the crowd and you are resting your backs against an ancient oak, your faces half-lit by the distant lights of the park. `How they eclipse the stars.’

`Imagine if the moon was closer, if it occupied half of our sky. We would watch fireworks on glowing background,’ you say, closing your eyes. `It would be a reminder of all the things we never think about. Maybe it would make us better.’

`Right before that, it would make us dead,’ he grins. `The tidal wave would grow and drown us all.’

`If we wouldn’t kill each other because of lunacy first,’ you reply. `You know the origin of the word? Luna means moon in Latin.’

`Luna,’ he repeats absently, like chanting a prayer with his lips but not with his spirit. `It would make a nice name. It’d fit you.’

`My name is the name of the Wiccan moon goddess, actually,’ you say.

`I know,’ he says, turning to you. Today, more than before, it is difficult to look away from his face, his eyes that seem to have gained back their light, shooting it in your direction in clear-cut rays. He is neither encumbered by depression or set ablaze by mania. If only for a little while, he is purely himself, and you are drawn to his presence, a still point in a world that is forever in motion, a safe harbour amidst empty waters. While you hold his gaze, you are dimly aware that he is moving closer, taking up the air from your space, dissolving the fabric of your conscience in a different background, liquid and languorous, like clocks melting down on walls, like happiness distilled in pure ether. His lips meet yours and your thoughts come to an abrupt end. Your mind fills with static.

You move inside the moment like it’s made of glass, cautious and careful, until the glass breaks altogether and everything bursts into a kaleidoscope of light and colour. For a violent second, you feel like the string connecting you to your body has pulled you back and you are yourself again, complete and so very alive. It takes you by surprise and even if it is gone almost immediately, it only makes the kiss burn brighter, makes you wish it would never end- his taste, bitter and intoxicating, the way his hand lingers on your neck, the way you feel that it’s not enough and that you want to wrap yourself in him and stay there forever- a shelter, a prison.

`You’re everything. I love you,’ he whispers in your hair and it’s only then that panic grips you, sharp as needles all over your skin, shocking like a knife through the heart.

How could you possibly allow everything to lead here? A slow build-up made of moments that each contained the essence of your finish line. You always knew. You always knew. How could you let it happen?

You want to get away from him, build a ladder to the centre of the earth and make a nest there, coddle with the darkness if only to oppose the burning shine of him and of the stars that he will inhabit- you would be the core holding the Earth into place and he would be your satellite, a symbiosis where you would never ever meet. Anything would be better than this- you will wreck him and leave him barren, waiting for someone who has never been there. You don’t want to do this, not to him; your twin, your mirror heart.

You don’t tell him any of this. You just take his hand in yours, as you always do, trying to etch the sensation into your skin because you know this is the last time.

With the noise of stars colliding above you and the layers of the Earth shifting and burning below you, it takes you four hours to fall asleep in the evening. The feeling of him fills your mind and your lungs until everything else is blocked from awareness. It all feels empty, like a distraction from the real void waiting to swallow you, but in the same time it feels more real than anything ever has before. You can’t explain it. You fall asleep in this contradiction, a quiet island in the middle of tormenting waters.

You wake up spent, exhausted, colourless. There are pyramidal pieces of black, heavy lead raining down from the sky, staining the backyard lawns black, piling on top of buildings like roofs, getting in the corner of your eye like stray flies and painting your vision darker. You go through the day motionless, frozen in your chrysalis while you do the chores, talk Damara into helping you organize your gem collection, go shopping and watch the sunset, caught in stillness on your windowsill, moving once with the Earth involuntarily. None of this was ever a choice. A string of events, rolling into each other and leading into this very moment, and you were asleep for every single one of them.

Of course, you don’t climb the hill anymore, neither do you lose yourself in something bigger than you, and the award for being outside your mind for hours at a time is wasted on someone else, someone who has never made an effort to stop their thoughts because they had none from the beginning. The world keeps spinning in stubborn silence, deaf to the bloodshed of every torturous day.

His absence grows wider in your chest, like an ache that threatens to swallow you whole. It’s only habit, you remind yourself. It’s only habit, but you’ve never felt like this before.

One time, you left a boy who had the kindest heart you had known. You’d felt sorry, compassionate, but you understood that you had to and hadn’t felt any pain. Now the streets open wide and you feel too small to inhabit them, the world opens to welcome you from all four cardinal points and you only feel like going upwards, dissolving into the grey. You suppose it had to get you down sometime, show you that you are human. Foolish, you had hoped that time wouldn’t come so soon.

Your dreams are more intense than ever, as if voices from another world are trying to override your own voices, the ones shaped by your thoughts, the ones that swallow your silence whole. You sing the fragments you remember to Damara and she listens without a word, playing with a tattered piece of paper that reads, I’m always with you. I never left you alone. - a sample of cruelty from her departed lover. For a few moments, your mind turns quiet while your voice rises, hits the walls and echoes back; a simple, mindless relief.

He calls you every day. You stare at the phone and try to make it disappear; you end up crying on the floor, on the ceiling, until your room turns transparent and your skin itches with the salt. The pain is exhilarating; it reminds you that you are alive, skin and bones and beating bleeding heart, or so you like to believe, because admitting that this, too, is pretense would be a sincerity you cannot afford. You don’t know what you’re crying for, who takes the blame this time, who is the dragon and who is the hero. Perhaps you are the hero, because you are saving him from yourself. Perhaps he is the dragon, consumed by the fire of his mind and everburning heart. But you know you’re wrong. You know who the villain really is, and you know how the story has to end.

He comes to your door sometimes, burning with rage or drowned in the sorrow inside himself with a thousand apologies. Either time, you close the door before he is done speaking. You do nothing else until evening comes; the fabric of your days, tattered and ruined by a boy whose skin is too weak to hold him inside.

Two weeks and your mind turns blank. It happens one morning, when you open your eyes and mistake the dull white of the ceiling with the background of your own mind.
Memories of feelings have faded away during the night, perhaps stolen by someone who wants to protect you, perhaps dulled into nothingness by their own dishonesty. You feel the same as before, only that you don’t really remember what ‘before’ felt like, so you suppose it’s more than that, more than numbness. You let the suspicion drift away on the silent waves of your consciousness and keep doing things as if you are really there, keep carrying the stone that now feels lighter than air, ethereal and empty. You get the whole house cleaned in one day, you take Damara out at the mall, you finish an entire book on synchronicity without understanding a thing, you go out for walks and make new friends. You talk about politics, movies, celebrities. You talk about the best way to remove stains from cotton and to check your boyfriend’s messages when he is not looking. You come home and face the emptiness in the mirror with mindless serenity, and fall asleep without a single thought.

Your mother is proud of you. You get the Daily Award four days in a row. When you cross paths with him on the street (him? was there ever one?), he looks at you with terror in his eyes, as if you have just ascended from hell, a stranger ghost. He looks awful, eyes swollen like he hasn’t slept for days, carrying himself like a tall saint, a martyr. You feel curiosity, fleeting affection, a trace of sadness like hot air on your skin, but they fade away when he disappears from your view, the only proof of his existence a weak sensation on your skin: the place where, for the shortest of moments, his hand brushed yours. A brief reminiscence of past times; a souvenir, a poor attempt at stealing a last broken, insignificant thing from you. You don’t look back. You feel his eyes bear into you, pleading, questioning. You shake the feeling, furrow your brows and keep going.

From then on, he stops leaving you alone. He sends you letters every day, leaves them in your mailbox, strings of words woven together and targeted at a heart that they never reach. You suppose he writes them late at night and wakes up at dawn, dresses himself with his clumsy hands, shaking perhaps, walks the road to your house crooked, takes a last look at the envelope as he places it in the box, stares into it as if he is trying to charge it with all the torment in his fickle soul, make it get to you, then leaves and keeps leaving and keeps coming back, like you are a point of gravity that always has him returning. His letters are mirrors of his mood, oscillating between high and low at indefinite times, dismissive and adoring, confrontational and humble, prose and poems in the fatalistic style that promises to tear up the seams of his spirit.

Aradia, aries, venus twenty-nine degrees in your sun sign, remember? you are destined to wreck every soul that you meet. you will keep leaving yourself alone until there is nothing to be left alone anymore. you are a monument to all the people you have hurt and you stand alone in the centre of their pain, blind and deaf to the way they fall apart around you. you, in your majestic singularity, you, in your self-righteous retreat. i wish no one ever has to know you how i knew you.

or

carve your name into their skin, again and again
clawing your way through hearts like
you’re stepping on clouds, ever so lightly
tiptoeing on the most fragile of glass,
a quiet ache in need of a fix.
watch your step, you never know
who walks beside you.

or

the hollow ladder in your brain must have broken by now
you step on air, cracking molecules beneath your feet
matter protests with a silent huff
challenging you in indifference

you’re making your way to some place higher
down the pit of your despair
you will find company up there, they say
madmen are very affable

turn the world upside down with your selfish whims

sometimes you stop to breathe and
stop thinking
your insane fantasies woven like a halo
spinning around your silly head

i am too shaken to find you beautiful anymore

and, sometimes, his naked soul unadorned by protest and delusion,

you are the lazy words flowing through my veins, keeping my blood running toward the centre of the earth. all my rivers are missing you. loneliness is a cold embrace of cloth, like a chrysalis around a dying thing to be reborn. but your voice was the anchor keeping me chained to reality, and without your clumsy care i don’t remember how to be alive. i shut all doors and windows, watching thoughts of you crawl through the cracks and melt into my skin like molten lead. i am a motionless statue to the weight of your indifference.

You let the words pass through you as if you are an open door, a one-second home to their weight, allowing them to slip by as soon as you understand them. You gather the letters in the bottom drawer of your desk, like they are precious things that you must keep separate from you; but keep them you must, otherwise they will take place in your heart and weigh it down as soon as they disappear from the physical world.

The decision is made. You have seen the fire in his eyes, but you will not have it burn for you.

One more week. You feel lighter, like your passing through this world has suddenly stopped being a burden and you have turned into a feather instead, carried wherever the wind takes you. You don’t read anymore, neither do you dream. You speak instead, words that have no weight or meaning, mere vibrations to propagate through rarefied air. Hollow and happy blur their limits until they become the same indefinite, ethereal concept, sheltering your heart in transparent cages.

His presence has almost become a comfortable blank in your mind when he shows up at your door. You open it because you know that nothing he has to say will change you.

`Look, I know what’s happening,’ he says. His eyes show a different kind of insomnia now. Graver, more sober, less stained by sentimentality. You are surprised that you can still read these things, see them on his face so openly. He’s rushing to talk, as if he’s afraid that you will shut the door in his face. He still knows you so well. `The stone, remember? We can talk about it now, ‘cause I realized what it’s about. It keeps us sober. Have you ever looked, I mean really looked at people’s faces? On the street, in subways, in restaurants? They’re all brainwashed. I know we always used to talk about this, but we didn’t really know, we just liked to believe that we were special. We were right, though. They’re trying to turn us into robots, make us stop thinking for ourselves and be led by our desires instead. Stability, comfort, luxury. Like animals working for their survival, but up a notch. They’re trying to control us, Aradia. Do you understand?’

You don’t understand. You think he has finally lost it completely.

`You’re insane,’ you say.

`You’ve stopped visiting the stone, but I haven’t. They haven’t touched it, they can’t. Remember the air raids above it? They keep trying to figure it out, but it doesn’t let them get close. I’ve seen people try to approach it and turn around like they’d gotten burned. The feeling it gives us, that’s what keeps us sober. It’s the closest thing to the truth that we can ever get, it’s an island in the middle of their manipulation. Can’t you see? You’ve been brainwashed. You’re getting awards for not thinking, for fuck’s sake! Aradia, please. You have to come with me. They’re keeping track of us, I don’t think we have a lot of time left. We can figure something out until then.’

`You’re leaving in a week and then you’ll be dead anyway,’ you tell him simply.

His expression isn’t as surprised as it should be, neither is it bitter. `And you? What will you be then?’

`Alive,’ you say, closing the door.

Your body is suddenly too heavy for your feet and you slip down with your back to the cold wood. You feel like you have just said the most terrible words ever, crashed worlds beneath your feet, irrevocably lost your soul. The body lying on the floor in the dim light of the afternoon, in a quiet house in a quiet city in a quiet world, just a carcass refusing to hold in all the wrongs that your heart has ever done. The chords keeping you together have broken; there is nothing left to save.

You lie in bed for hours, your mind silent under the heavy weight pressed upon it. At midnight, Damara sneaks in and puts her arms around you and you spend the night pretending, together, that you can fall asleep. She cries the tears that you’re not able to let out, her, with her restless sentimentality, her, a moment of comfort in the hurricane of your heart. You don’t feel numb anymore, you don’t. You only feel broken.

You wake up in a flood. Two rivers, digging parallel lines on the highway of your skin, rolling in droplets onto the floor and staining it transparent. You are alone now; every tear echoes like crystal in the silence of your room, like the ethereal songs you used to sing when you still… You remember having dreamt of an aircrash in your back yard, then acid rain and clear water to wash it all in the end. You remember crying in your dream for something you had lost, you don’t remember what it was, so you keep crying for a thing that never existed, and isn’t all crying essentially done for things that are not real?

You feel real now. You feel like you have just woken up. You always kept waking up, in a sense, opening your eyes in the morning and believing that you were alive, watching the feeling dim as the day progressed only to have it anew at the next dawn. Every day, you kept waking up from waking up, and every next day you would wake up from that, too, until you forgot where this all started, if at the beginning you were the sleeper or the awake. But now, it feels like the whole thing has come crashing down at your feet in a heap of insignificance. What does it matter, asleep or awake, hollow or meaningful, kind or cruel? It’s all in the past. Those waves have settled down for eternity, leaving you room to breathe. Nothing is waiting to pass, nothing is waiting to be done, only you were hanging in the air and kept missing your own life, living it through the prism of the void behind you. Yeah, so there is a void there. Yeah, it’s as frightening as anything could ever be, but it’s yours, and everything that is yours, you can redeem.

what you break is what you get, he had written in one of his letters. You keep crying for hours, until there is nothing left to spill out, until that something that broke in you has allowed everything to flow outside. Your room is a mess, your mom will be furious, the top floor is still demolished and the world is still waiting to wake up, but you leave that all behind you, because you know where you have to go.

You rush there, scared that lucidity might not last. The world is a blur of colours and you are sure that, if you stopped to really look around, everything would burst with life and fill the emptiness with presence, but you have time for that later, you have all the time in the world. You climb the hill barefoot, almost running, almost falling to the ground and never getting up again, petrified with the awe of being alive.

You arrive right on time, when your mind is starting to slip out of itself again, pulled down by mass anesthesia and by your own stubborn demons. He lights up when he sees you, as illuminated as the crystal he is entranced by, as if its shining has made a home inside him and reflected through his fiery eyes, a fire inside that could end in either destruction or rebirth. You sit beside him, your bodies touching but not quite, your eyes connected to his, but both of you looking at something beyond the other, something more vast and more liberating than the wheel of birth and death etched in your atoms. You can feel your body spinning once with the earth, your earth spinning once with the galaxy, your galaxy dancing its pattern through the immeasurable void. You can feel your mind come back to you and settle down, second by second, as the stone floods you with liquid light. His presence beside you is an amplifier to the heights you are reaching, frequencies changing until your vibrations are tuned in with the purest form, the heart of light. There are things you cannot explain, like dreams from another world or how you knew everything about him before you knew him, like reaching outside of your body and feeling infinite, and you are sure that he will find the right way of writing this down, but you, you just want to feel it for now, feel your lungs fill with the purest air and your mind breathe in sync with the world.

`We can’t go there again,’ he tells you later, lying on the grass in his backyard, watching the cloudless sky sit still, a mirror to your soul. ‘They’re surveying the place and they’ll risk an assault soon.’

`How do you know that?’ you turn to him.

`Remember the voices I was telling you about? When I was at my worst, they reached out again and told me what I needed to know. This time, I understood. I guess they want the best of us to be safe.’

`The best of us? Really?’

‘There aren’t many who are not asleep,’ he says, looking you into the eye. ‘We’re fucked up, I know that better than anyone. But we’re not asleep, and they believe that we can make something out of it, grow out of our selfishness. That’s our problem, you know. We only care about ourselves.’

`Did they tell you that, too?’ you protest, a weak distraction from your ego; at your core, you know he is right.

`No, that one I figured by myself.’

You wonder whether he is thinking about you when you ignored him for weeks, or about himself when he let himself hurt by it, or about your self-created glass walls from behind which you examined the world like you were living on a different plane. You, you know what you are thinking of: your mother and Damara, your sense of duty towards them, the way you use helping them as a distraction to pull you out of the mud. You don’t know if you really care about them, you don’t know if you love them. This, too, you’ll have to figure out.

‘I’m sorry for not believing you,’ you tell him.

‘Forgiven,’ he replies, and you know that he understood what you are really apologizing for, because he doesn’t look at you and his voice is still corrupted by an involuntary tone of grief. You can sense his forgiveness running out of his heart and pouring into yours; it’s rational more than anything, slivers of mercury, sharp and focused, overwriting the black smoke of resentment, trying to hide it from your view. You have nothing to say; you both know that neither of you can plead innocent and you know that it takes time to rebuild an effigy that burned down, but you have the foundation and you have yourselves, and both are things that you trust.

You rest your head and your palm on his chest, feeling his heart drum. You ascend towards the curve of his neck, always a fascination, feeling his pulse pick up when you leave kisses on your way to his lips. His hands are in your hair this time, trying to pull you closer pull you through him like he is a ghost to your heavy concreteness, but you both stay as real as real can be, every point of contact between your bodies a burning star, an anchor to time and space. Any thought vanishes, replaced by the simple desire to have him; no, to become him, because you will not make the mistake that he made, thinking that anyone can truly posses someone else.

You dissolve into each other, first in your kiss in the backyard, then between his sheets, forgetting about the grief and the confusion and deepening the larger enigma instead, the incomprehensible fact of being alive. He burns as bright as you thought, deft hands and fervent devotion, but arranged in patient precision instead of the chaos you had expected. Your fingertips on his skin are an echo to the way your bones sing for him, lit up from their core, shaking in a steady pattern of fever; a contradiction, your feelings for him, making you want to curl into him and sit quiet forever, making you want to tear the world down into pieces with the fire in your minds and bodies. For all the passion-fueled words in his letters, he keeps silent all along and you are the one who is talking instead, reassurance and affection and endearment, things you never ever thought you could speak. You are in awe with the way the world seems complete when you two are like this, as if everything you have been searching all along, all your divergent thoughts, melt and flow into this moment and you need nothing else.

‘I have an uncle who’s in command of one of the ships,’ he tells you after. ‘He’s gonna try to advance me to intel before I get killed. If I’ll be good enough, that is. Once I’m there, I should be safe and I should be able to help. I don’t know how yet, but I imagine it’ll be easier communicating with them once I get out there. You’re gonna stay here and be safe until I return. I’ll make sure of that.’ He tells you all this on a neutral tone of voice, laced with exhaustion but undeniably clear, as if he was talking about the state of the weather and not about your very lives. More than ever, you are filled with feeling, so you look at him in wonder.

‘After all that you wrote,’ you say.

`I was controlled by my mercurial moods. It won’t happen again. We both know what really matters. You’ll be safe if you stop going there. At one point, I’ll come back to you. Hell knows it’ll be hard but we can manage as long as there’s something to fight for. You know I’ll come back, yeah?’ His fingers brush your cheek and there is that determination in his eyes again, like he could burn down worlds and rebuild them all at once, and you almost forgive him for his earlier promptness.

`How long has it been?’

‘Hm?’

‘Since the mood changes stopped.’

He smiles at that, sly and content, like he is proud of you.

`A week, since I realized what’s really happening here. I focused more on the stone and heard their voices, then something clicked and I realized I don’t have to be like this anymore, you know? There’s no purpose to it now. I need a clear mind to deal with everything. There’s a whole world out there, Aradia.’ He gets up, leaning on his elbows and looking you in the eye. You can feel the fascination radiating from his skin to yours, naked truth circulating between you. `And our world can get better, it can be healed. But it needs people like us.’

‘How are we going to help, though, if we can’t access the stone anymore? You saw what happened to me when I stopped going there. Everyone is like that. I was always like that before I discovered it.’

‘They’ve taught me how to get the benefits of it without having to be physically there, or leaving any mental trace for anyone to detect. I’m going to teach you.’

`I don’t really trust them,’ you say, surprising yourself. You hadn’t realized you thought it, before now.

‘That doesn’t really surprise me,’ he says. His hair tickles your stomach and you let out a giggle, at which he bursts into laughter and starts kissing you and it takes a while until you slip out of the comfortable haze of the moment and into the concrete again.

`Why, though?’ you ask.

`Because you’re very grounded in this place, even though you don’t feel like it. The voices you’re hearing, they come from our planet’s history, they’re your heritage. Your roots grow deep here. I think it’s natural for you to be distrustful of any outer presence. But if you don’t trust them, trust me. They’re very different from us, in the best way possible. They have crystal and consciousness-based technology and they’ve went way past our dualistic way of seeing things. You know what I’m talking about. Just ask your own voices,’ he says, and it’s hard not to burst in laughter again after that last sentence, which leads to more kissing and more distraction, a spiral of losing yourselves in this new, warm something like you are children running in a golden field.

‘I’ve never tried to contact them,’ you say. ‘I’ve just… went with it when it happened.’

‘I guess it’s harder, ‘cause they don’t actually exist in the same time-space with us, you have to connect with the past.’

‘Which mostly means connecting with my heritage.’

‘Yeah. Think you can do it?’

‘Of course.’ You want to find out what the voices were trying to tell you all this time and whether there is any connection between them and the voices Sollux is hearing, even though his are not really voices, but presences, as he explained. You’ve always believed in alien races, of course. You’ve never really thought of the other things- consciousness, telepathy, the nature of reality, because it was always more simple not to question anything and to feel instead. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening, though. They want to help us, right?’

‘Yeah, they do. We’re the black sheep. The Earth’s been holding our galaxy back for thousands of years, us with our poorly developed consciousness and our excessively material view of reality. Other civilizations have finally decided it’s time to lend a hand and we took it as a threat.’

‘Are they allowed, though?’

‘To step in?’

‘Yes. Shouldn’t we evolve by ourselves, give ourselves more time? We’re obviously not ready to be helped if we see them as a danger.’

‘You could be right. But they’ve been waiting for centuries, and we’re not as unreceptive as we would’ve been some time ago. Things are starting to change. The more people are trying to control us, the more we’re starting to wake up.’

‘But most people are completely blind.’

‘No one is completely blind. They just haven’t realized that there’s no need to be blind.’

‘Like you hadn’t realized there’s no need to be bipolar.’

‘Yeah.’

‘That’s… hard to believe,’ you say. ‘It’s not how things work.’

‘Just try it,’ he says.

‘The things I’ve understood from the ancient language that they spoke to me in- it isn’t much, but a big part of it was pain and trial. They didn’t see it as a curse, though. They saw it as necessary. I’m not telling you that from their words, but from the feelings I received. There was suffering, but behind it there was this strange peace of mind. Like they knew it would pass. It’s unlike anything I’ve felt from people in our time.’

He nods. ‘And when you’ve learned what you needed to learn from it, you are free to let it go. You usually do this without purpose.’

You keep silent for a few moments, only listening to yourself. ‘I think it’s happening to me, too.’

‘I know. I can see it.’

You lock eyes and stay like that for a long time, from minutes to eons, because when you lean in to kiss him time has melted and the world has shrunk, encapsulated in his dark irises. You start again, fire and wonder, until you are equally out of your mind and inside it, until you are spent and dazed and blissful; your mutual destruction, brought down to be replaced with something beautiful and burning and alive.

Before you fall asleep that night, you try to contact them as Sollux said. At first you hear nothing- it’s been a while since you last heard them, since you last went to the stone- but after a few minutes on focusing on your intention, their mingled voices flood your mind with haunting refrains and broken speech. You ask them about the ones that Sollux is in contact with, about the war and the spacecrafts and the stone and all the things you cannot explain. You are met with a short silence before a single voice speaks on monotone. You cannot tell if it’s a male or a female voice, but it sooths you to the bone, quieting your mind.

We have left the stone as an artifact of awareness and a message to future generations. We saw your reflections in the lake and knew that its creation was the only chance to redeem the places you will have forgotten all about. We have not excluded the possibility of extraterrestrial contact, even though we have not yet attained it. The records of our forefathers tell us that this possibility is real. We assume they would understand how the stone works. We cannot assume anything about their benevolence. Our visions of the future are made of tangled roads and intersections, but as it has always been, the directions depend on which possibilities you decide to turn into realities. Not one thing is set in stone. But remember that good and evil forces have always been at odds against each other. Where you believe you have found allies, you can find enemies. Where enemies lie, you can be surprised by allies. Guard your trust and trust your heart, but be careful where your faith lies. Goodbye.

You fall asleep almost immediately, only having time to realize how drained you feel. When you wake up, you realize that you barely know anything you didn’t know before.

‘No one will give you answers on a plate,’ Sollux says, amused by your grumpiness.

‘So how do you explain you turning into a know-it-all over the night, hm?’,you tease.

‘The things they told me had been taking shape in my mind for months now. They only helped me put them into place. Calm down, everything will make sense eventually,’ he says, kissing your forehead. But the truth is, there is tension strung in your bones like high voltage electricity and you don’t know what to do with it, you don’t know who to trust. He is leaving soon and you might never see him again. He is leaving soon and somehow he’s already left, held in the hands of forces you do not know, and this scares you more than you want to admit.

‘I don’t want to do this without you,’ you say, without looking at him.

‘I’ll always be here.’ You hold each other for a few minutes, on sheets that have stopped being foreign and beneath a sky that will steal him away from you, but the dawn is cracking through the window and even though reality has yet to become a thing that you are looking forward too, you appreciate it nevertheless; the cruel, beautiful circumstance of not being alone, if only for one more week, if only forever.

You spend your days like you’re in a dream. For the better part of the week, you forget about wars and aliens and the ultimatum floating above your heads, the cruel reminder that good things must come to an end. You walk through the city for hours, until night falls and you are forced to return to illuminated places towards the centre, where you get lost in the crowd and dance and scream unknown names with them while inane music is drumming through your veins from the stage above. You go to the amusement park again and again, get stuck on top of the spinning wheel and climb down in a dream while the crowd cheers below, you buy candy cotton and use it as a fake beard until your clothes are stained and sticky and you push each other in the circular fountain to get cleaned, splashing and laughing and keeping each other underwater until the police comes and threatens to arrest you. Fuckin’ doped kids, they throw at you and you laugh and laugh because now you know you are awake. You find kitties in deserted neighbourhoods and bring them food and watch their big, scared eyes turn soft and playful, you rent a house from an imaginary owner and sleep in it for two nights, your own house, deserted and empty and dusty but definitely yours, a private place where you can grow your ideas like weeds and bloom them into flowers, a place where the world comes down to you and him and nothing more, as simple as a nod or a smile.

You thought it would be complicated, at first, because you always do, and it always used to be. But here, in the heart of a place that you made your own, when the only thing you need is the silence between kisses and words, between brushing of fingers and meeting of eyes, you realize that it isn’t. It isn’t complicated at all; it’s the easiest thing, talking nonsense about a pretty sunrise, weaving the hours together like notes in a melody, flowing gently onto each other, reaching the heart of the day without wondering what you will do next, because it doesn’t matter anymore. You didn’t get to the core of your worries, they just vanished entirely. You didn’t escape the void, you looked it back in the eye to prove that you are not afraid and let it swallow you- gently, like falling in the arms of sleep on a tired evening.

‘I love you,’ you tell him, and once you would have told him I think I love you, because thinking was all you did, but now the light and darkness at the centre of you shines unbothered, amplified by his presence, and your web of thoughts is starting to clear its dust and muddy waters. I love you, you repeat in your mind, in case his ears didn’t hear you, and when you hear him answer back, you’re not sure whether it was spoken or only felt. Now there is constant sun between you, sometimes gentle warmth, sometimes scorching heat threatening to burn you to the core, but it’s nothing like the cold lead you felt coming from him in your first days together, affection hidden behind labyrinths of entangled thoughts. He is clearer now, not transparent but clearer, like the waves have settled down to allow the still reflection of the moon, and it echoes through you, helping your own storm to subside.

You ask him to read you more of his poems, with the frail hope that the strokes of pain in his frame will fade away once he is completely honest with you. He doesn’t read you anything else that he wrote in the time you were apart, though, and you are both relieved and disappointed, too afraid to reach into the past and revive the selves that both of you inhabited back then, even if it was only a few days ago, even if you feel terrible for having made him suffer.

fire slipping through your thumbs, setting
the air ablaze, shaping
the space around you in cherries and swirls

His voice is clear cut, but brimming with the words he is speaking.

your hands
are the tools of an architect running wild, the soles of your feet
grow roots through the earth to the stars below

It’s past noon, everybody is sleepy from the unstoppable motion of the Earth and you are listening to him read, slowing down his rhythm until every word is a separate living being clutching at your heart. He’s looking at you, straight to centre, like he can see right through.

you are a string to the universe, entwining
its strangest melodies in the pattern of your dance

He teaches you to channel the calming energy of the stone even in its physical absence. You sit on the lakeshore with your palms upwards, swallowed by silence, and listen. Through the ether, you can feel the distant presence of the ones that Sollux is in touch with; a cold, foreign touch to your mind, but clear and gentle as the calm surface of the lake. There are no words being said, only a steady flow of energy surrounding you and taking you in when you are confident enough to allow it. You remind yourself that you are not alone in this. His presence beside you keeps you real, steadies you into purpose. When he touches your shoulder, the signal that the session is over, you slip back to normal directly into a calm, serene state of mind, just like you used to feel when you woke up from the trance that the stone induced. Sollux is looking at you with wide, smiling eyes.

‘How’d it feel?’

‘Not as… otherworldly as the stone made me feel. When we were there, I was constantly afraid that I’d completely slip away and be unable to come back. It was different now, steadier and clearer.’

‘It’s the same for me,’ he smiles. ‘I guessed it also helped that we did it together.’

‘We used to be together back on the hill, too.’

‘Yeah, but now it’s different, isn’t it?’ You can’t help but smile back. It really is different, and sometimes you have a hard time believing it- you surprise yourself slipping back into old thought patterns only to realize that they’re not you anymore, they’re only empty shells, templates that will never be filled again, and then you smile and smile just like you are smiling now, feeling like you have landed in the centre of a wonder.

‘I don’t know how much harder it’ll be for you to do it alone, but we’ll practice every day, and then you’ll practice alone, and you’ll get the knack of it.’

‘Four more days,’ you state matter-of-factly.

‘Yeah. I should start packing.’

‘Don’t,’ you say. ‘Not until tomorrow.’

‘What’s tomorrow?’

‘It’s the day when you are allowed to start packing. Today is still ours.’

‘Today is still ours,’ he repeats, getting up and starting to run across the lakeshore like a madman before you have the chance to ask him what’s happening. Naturally, you follow him, and when you’ve almost caught up, shouting and trying not to laugh and lose the oxygen you need for running, he turns around and pushes you both into the water.
You end up staying there half of the day. He teaches you how to dive underwater and you finally dare to keep your eyes open, witnesses to the ethereal beauty of the life hiding behind the glassy surface of the lake. You walk home at night holding hands and feeling like teenagers whose life has just begun, an explosion of cherry-coloured recklessness and joy, and the next day you start it all over, taking the train to a lost village in the mountains. You roam the streets and play with the dirty children on the roadside, you talk to the villagers like you’ve known them forever. You leave with your pockets full of apples and your hands full of raspberries; you eat them off each other’s fingers on the trip back home and for a minute, you pretend that you are homeless wanderers traveling wherever the road takes you.

‘We could do that, you know,’ you tell him. ‘We could leave and hide somewhere in a nice village like this one, where no one could find us. They’d never know.’

‘They’d know,’ he says, looking out the window. ‘I wish I could be like that, sometimes. The kind of person who leaves it all behind and risks everything just to be happy. But I have responsibilities.’

‘Saving the world sounds so tedious,’ you say, and you’d meant it as a joke but it ends up sounding serious. He turns to you and smiles his kind smile, the one that seems to have grown roots in the past few days.

‘I’ll be wearing a pretty hot suit, though,’ he jokes and the air around you turns light again. When you get home, he shows you pictures of a chartreuse two-piece with a ridiculous amount of pockets and belts of a slightly darker nuance. Except for these details, it looks like an average military suit, but it’s his colour, so you can understand why he likes it. Then he shows you the intel uniform, classy black with gold accents, and you imagine how the tailoring would suit his slim frame; suddenly, you understand his enthusiasm, quite more than it’s appropriate, and it’s really a shame that his mother is waiting downstairs with dinner.

She acts like nothing is wrong, but you can feel the chrysalis of sadness surrounding her, and even without your gifts, you could read it in the wrinkles around her eyes, the way her mouth smiles but her eyes stay still, the way her hand always lingers on his shoulder more than necessary. She is going to lose her only son. You imagine visiting her every day, keeping her company when her husband is away with business- and he always is, you’ve only seen him once or twice. You imagine taking care of the bees. You imagine adopting a dog, making intergalactic calls every evening, taking up new hobbies, applying to a university. You imagine becoming best friends with Feferi, pretending that you were never jealous of her. You imagine all of these things in the small spaces when he is away, gone to the bathroom or sleeping or talking to someone else but you, and as soon as he is back you chase them away like they were never there.

He breaks down crying that night before you do and you follow, reveling in the sadness like it’s another one of your plans, another turn of the labyrinth that you are taking together. It could’ve been different. One single change, one moment in which he could’ve changed his mind and not sent the application in, and you could’ve stayed like this forever, happy and oblivious and so very alive. But somehow, you know that if he wouldn’t be leaving, none of this would’ve happened in the first place. You would’ve kept staying in your self-made prison and laughed bitterly at the world around you while your souls would have crumbled into pieces, and you would’ve still loved each other, but less simple, less sincere. Muddy waters, a reflection of a reflection of a wounded sky.

Now you are trying to patch it together, to breathe in the clear. You try to meditate without him and it doesn’t work as well, the energy flowing through you is weaker and so is their presence, but the effects are still there, the calmness swallowing you. So when he bursts into tears, you hold him and you hold yourself, reassuring him that none of this is his fault, that he will do a great job. You don’t tell him that he’ll come back alive. You don’t dare think about it.

You wake up slightly more aware, slipping out of the drunken happiness you waded in for the past few days; when you look at him, you know he is waking up too. You spend the rest of your days together talking and staring at the sky, purposefully oblivious to everything else. He writes you poems and, in exchange, you give him all the feeling you are capable of, sending it in waves through your skin to his. He starts packing his things and you start gathering your sadness in tight packages so it won’t slip all at once, so you can take it in small pieces throughout the days, weeks, months. In the evening before he leaves everything is a mess of smeared colours, gloomy grey on pastel, and you hold each other like it’s the end of the world.

‘I’d wanted to do something special,’ he tells you. ‘Take you to dinner somewhere nice, make it memorable. But it would’ve stolen us too much time.’

‘And we would’ve had to pretend. People and everything…’ you drawl. You are tired, but you are decided not to waste one minute on sleeping, even if that means staying awake and watching him sleep- it crosses your mind that you would be like a widow who is looking at her dead lover, knowing that she is the one who bears the burden of staying alive without him. Dramatic and useless, but he is melting in your arms as you speak- he needs his rest, and you need these last hours like the air you are breathing.

Suddenly, he leaves the bed with a big yawn and a smile.

‘Come on, I have something to show you.’

‘But I thought you’d said…’

‘I lied,’ he grins, taking your hand.

You go outside, where the stars are sprawled across a clear sky in bright patterns; the lack of clouds makes it possible to see the Milky Way, a bigger home, a promise of something else. You always feel terribly small and lonely when you look up at the sky, even though you know that you carry all the stars in the universe inside you. Soon enough, you will be left to look up without a warm hand holding yours, and then you will have no choice but to learn to be by yourself. Don’t think about it. Don’t think at all. He takes you to a clear spot between the trees and shrubs where there is a blanket, two small lamps and… wow. Is that a telescope?

‘I’ve always wanted one,’ you say, your worries replaced by childish enthusiasm in one second. It’s not a small, amateur device, it’s almost as big as you are and you understand almost none of its parts, but you still touch it as if it’s from another world. ‘Did you have it all along?’ you ask, noticing how old it looks.

‘It used to be my grand-grandfather’s, before space travel was possible. It’s nothing compared to the ones they’re making now, but I thought you’d like it.’

‘I love it,’ you say, your voice full of admiration. It’s something that belongs to the past; of course that its mere existence leaves you in awe, triggering spirals of memories you don’t remember encoding, evoquing scenes long gone and reminding you that every moment, past or future, only exists in its perpetual presence. An old man, going out in his backyard after a fight with his wife, looking at the stars and dreaming of something different. A young child, sneaking out at night with an astronomy book even though she doesn’t know how to read, imagining a different life for every single planet out there. A lost soul, trying to break into the house at night and stopping to watch the stars instead, a childhood dream that was never fulfilled. When you look through the lens, you are simultaneously yourself and all these people, you are re-living every moment in which their eyes aligned with the stars, their curiosity and their awe elevating yours to an unearthly feeling. You look at Sollux and you try to express all these things through unspoken words, you try to send him at least the hundredth part of how history makes you feel: insignificant yet omnipotent, ephemeral yet immortal, nostalgic yet in complete awareness, the strongest coincidentia oppositorum you’ve ever felt.

‘I’ve mapped out our trajectory,’ he says, unfolding a rolled piece of paper where he’s handdrawn the Milky Way and the surrounding galaxies, white on black. You don’t know how he did it, but you can see the dark matter extending between any two space objects, the stardust trailing behind planets in perpetual motion, blue and white and yellow, fantasmic but still real. ‘We’re gonna make a stop on Mars first, to pick up some soldiers and fuel. Then we’re heading for the Pleiades, where we’re attacking.’ He shows you the map: Atlas, Pleione and their seven daughters, and then you look at the sky and find them there, far away and untouchable, promises of worlds beyond your imagination. For a moment you envy Sollux- if there is anything you want, it’s to escape the dullness of the days, and what better way to do it than leave the Earth behind? But you remember that his mission is one of almost certain death- you think you remember, you’ve never really thought of it, never processed it well, because you don’t think you could- and it occurs to you that it’s sad, how man’s first steps on different planets will be made towards war and destruction.

He shows you all the constellations; you look up at Aries and Gemini, trying to imagine the unknown ways in which the stars influence every single aspect of your life and failing to grasp the enormity of it with more than a feeble spark of intuition. The night flows as you whisper, almost reverently, about the movement of the stars and the motion of love and everything that is created and uncreated from a force beyond your understanding. You aren’t rushing, this time; you know that truth is there, waiting patiently for you to unveil it. Until then, the seconds are for living.

‘I think you won’t be the only one traveling,’ you tell him at one point. You hadn’t meant to tell him, you wanted to keep your future all to yourself since he is not going to be in it anyway- telling him felt like a betrayal, but now, with the vast, starry sky above you, everything else but the truth seems too small to matter.

‘What do you mean?’

‘After you leave, I’m gonna pack and take the first train to wherever. There are some places I’ve always wanted to see, and I guess I’ve always waited for someone to come and take me there, but that’s stupid. Those days on the road with you were the best. I’m going to try and recreate that on my own, see what I find.’

He seems pleasantly surprised. ‘Gonna give up school?’

‘For a while. I have to return to mom and Damara at one point. I didn’t want to leave them in the first place, but… I need some time alone.’

‘Are you sure it’s what you need right now? I mean, I’m gonna leave and all. You’ll already be alone, even if you’re gonna be around people. Being on your own would just make it worse, wouldn’t it?’

‘I don’t know,’ you shake your head. ‘I have to try.’

‘And you’d be safer,’ he adds after a moment. ‘In case they raid the city or whatever. It’s better that you leave. It’d crossed my mind before, but I never thought you’d leave your family. You surprise me,’ he smiles.

‘With my self-centeredness? That’s hardly new,’ you joke, but you both know the hidden meaning behind your words.

‘I forgive you,’ he says then, clear and simple, like affirming that the sky is blue, and this time you feel it coming from his mind as much as from his heart. ‘And I hope you can forgive me for my own selfishness.’ He means his overactive heart, you suppose; he means not leaving you alone, he means Feferi and his indecision, his constant oscillation between any two things, feelings, people. You feel like none of this matters anymore.

‘Of course I do,’ you reply, barely a whisper, after silence has etched the words in your bones.

You know you will never be able to look at the sky again without thinking of him, so you kiss him and pull him close, promising that you won’t forget, that someday you will come up to him and the universe will be too small to hold both of you then, that you will sing to him even after he is gone and the atoms that once made him will still hear you in their harmonic silence. You tell him things you’ll never remember having said, because they were too truthful to bear, and things that you will always remember, things that are meant to help you hold on despite the meekness of their reality. You tell him everything in all the languages you know, with your voice and heart and body, and he never stops promising that he will be back, in this life or in another, and that he will find you- as yourself, as the breeze, as stardust and sunlight piercing the void.

The dream lifts when dawn comes. His mother wakes up, his friends arrive and you are all supposed to drive him to the airport, where he’ll take a plane to the capital and embark on the space shuttle the next morning. You feel like it’s all over too soon; you appreciate it that Karkat and Feferi are there for him, and more than that, you appreciate that Feferi doesn’t seem to bear a grudge against you, despite everything that happened, but you still wish, egotistically, to have him all for yourself until he leaves. You’ve never felt anything like this for someone before, this jealousy on anyone who has his attention, the desire to take him away and be the centre of his world in a faraway place, where the two of you can build something that will not be brought down by flood or draught or quicksand. Yet, when you arrive at the airport after half an hour of holding his hand in the car and joking with his friends, you know that you won’t be the only one who will miss him.

‘I talked to your mother,’ his mom tells you above the noise of the departing planes, smiling between sweet and sorrowful, ‘and we got you a ticket, too. You’ll be staying at a hotel until tomorrow.’

You see him lit up and it’s enough to fill you with joy; even though you feel like it’s too much, a painful extension of your last days together, right when you had almost learned to say goodbye. You embark on the two-hour flight and it takes all you have not to break down and cry as you hold his hand, again, all the way; you are distracted by the way your eyes never keep leaving each other’s and you feel his gaze even when your eyelids fall, shielding tears that are not allowed to break to the surface, not when he’s still here, alive and vibrant beside you.

You go with him to the military centre, where a man with a firm jaw and kind eyes informs him about the departure. It’s a large building made entirely of metal and glass, airy and estranged, but charming in its otherworldliness and, you think, completely inappropriate for its purposes. You leave as soon as possible, even though a part of you wants to stay there and explore this wretched architecture, a gilded tomb for soldiers that will never even be buried there, but will become stardust instead, their names and courage lost among the vastness of the void.

‘It’s beautiful,’ you say while you go down the escalator, looking up at the transparent dome-like ceiling.

‘The sky? Yeah,’ he smiles, and you elbow him in return. ‘ No, I get what you mean. It is beautiful.’

‘But?’

‘Useless,’ he shakes his head.

It’s these moments you’ll miss the most- the patterns you’ve made in your conversations, the way you can predict each other’s replies based on an algorithm only you know, the way you can be in a crowded room, talk to other people, yet still only be fully understood by each other, because his thoughts are yours and yours are his in a way that you don’t know if you’ll ever experience with anyone else. The thought makes you want to cry again, but you brush away the weakness and return to him instead.

The rest of the city turns out to be quite the same- glassy and impersonal, familiarity exchanged for cold comfort. You walk the streets with the intention to sightsee, but he’s as absent-minded as you are; you end up spending the rest of your day in the hotel room, tangled in the sheets and watching silly shows on the wall-wide TV screen, which is so unlike the two of you that you end up laughing at the irony. You aren’t paying much attention, though, just skimming through the plot; sunset finds you caught in each other’s chains, laughing and crying until you have no idea which is which. Afterwards, it all comes down to a soft tranquility, laced with the illusion of eternity; there are less than ten hours before he leaves.

‘I’m going to keep in touch somehow,’ he says, his fingers a feather touch on your skin, like he’s mapping you out, leaving ghost fingerprints for when he’s gone.

‘If you can,’ you reply. ‘But you have to focus on the mission. Keep in touch with them and find out what you can do to help.’

‘The greatest thing I could ever do is to stop this war. But it seems so big, so impossible that I don’t even dare think about it.’

‘I believe in you,’ you say. ‘And I’m not just saying it because you’re leaving tomorrow, and you might die, and I might never see you again. I’m not even saying it because I’m in love with you. I can see the fire burning inside you, and when you’ll let it out, nothing will stop you.’

‘I can feel it, too. Fire is ambivalent, you know? It can either create or destroy. If I tame it and then let it out, it’ll bring transformation, it’ll create something new. I don’t know what exactly, but I can feel that it would be something important, and not just for me. Maybe not for the whole world either, but… something big, you know? But if I don’t control it, it’s gonna destroy me.’

‘You’re not alone.’

‘I have friends in high places,’ he laughs. ‘Literally.’

‘Mine are rather the opposite,’ you smile, pointing your head towards the ground.

‘If I’m fire, aiming towards the sky, you’re water. Flowing freely, yet undeniably woven with the earth. You’re the balance I need. You know, I’ve always written poetry, but it only started making sense when I started writing about you.’

You think of telling him that you feel the same, only that for you it’s not poetry, it’s life itself that started making sense after you’ve met him; you know he would love to hear it, but you don’t find the guts to say it. It would be too much, too much for a love that takes you away from each other so soon. It would be too much for any kind of love, extending it to your entire life, and if you’ve already done this, well- you are not going to accept your defeat by admitting it, not now, right before your life is about to be taken away.

‘I’ve always found it fascinating,’ you say instead, ‘how fire is such a volatile element, yet it always exists on Earth in one way or another. Imagine if all the flames that are lit right now went out and all the volcanoes became dormant. If only for a second, we would have no more fire on Earth. What happened if you’d try to light up a candle then?’

‘You’re forgetting about the lava inside the earth,’ he says. ‘Even if volcanoes become dormant, the fire is still there.’

‘Why haven’t I thought of that?’ you wonder.

‘Well, ‘cause it’s ruining your thought experiment,’ he laughs. ‘But even if all fire disappeared, its potentiality would still be there. I think all elements are born from ether, and ether is never non-existent.’

‘So we could light the candle,’ you conclude.

‘We’d better, it’s getting dark,’ he smiles, and you do, compensating for the falling light at the horizon. Eventually you take it to the bathroom, where you have a bath together, and then fall asleep against your will, tangled in each other’s arms.

You can’t lead him to the shuttle because you started crying and can’t stop, like Damara once had, like you once had yourself, and you are flooding the room and the entire city and eventually the whole planet is overcome with tears, and everyone believes that the seas overflowed, and you’re mad because you want them to know the truth. Now you’re sitting on a cloud, reading a catalogue of all the soldiers who died in space, glory etched on every and each one of their faces, but then you discover that there are stickers placed over the real photos, shots that show faces of disappointment and confusion. You call Sollux to warn him, but at the other end of the line there is only silence.

You wake up shaking; three in the morning, the ethereal light from the city is glowing outside your windows and casting dim colours on his skin. You don’t wake him up; he needs the rest. You spend your remaining four hours watching him instead, trying to weave yourself into his dreams, trying not to think too hard how you wish him awake.

‘I can’t believe we fell asleep,’ he says first thing when he wakes up, a look of panic on his face.’ You don’t tell him how you woke up; you keep those hours a private memory, a sanctuary of your own, even though you end up regretting them.

‘Shh,’ you reply, silencing him with a kiss. ‘You’ve got a spaceship to catch.’

Later on, you spend a lot of time wondering how things would’ve gone if he hadn’t signed up for the job on a whim, if he’d been himself enough to make a sober decision. But now, now you know from the look on his face that this is the single most important decision he has ever made, and that it was the right one.

As you watch the shuttle fly away, the imprint of his last kiss still on your lips, his mind still interlaced with yours, it’s difficult to believe that you are the same people you were months ago when you first met, dazed and enchained by your own thoughts; and the truth is, you aren’t.No man steps in the same river twice.You are homesick for all the people you’ve yet to be, for all the people that he will be in your absence, but right now, the unwritten pact between the two of you tells you that you are not allowed to lose hope. Hope needs you, he’d joked once, but you know he was right; everything needs everything in order to exist, things need to be observed in order to be created and the creators need their masterpieces in order to make sense of their lives, and if this all sounds too complicated in your head, you know that somewhere, speeding away from the earth ten thousands of miles per hour, he understands. And this fact alone is enough.