Mingled skins.
The taste  of burnt chips.
Hand in hand.
Shoulder to shoulder.

Light flickering in the room; only source of it visible- the candle.
Burning, flickering, not too bright, not too dim, in the middle of the room.
On the mahogany table.
Next to the star globe he got from her on their anniversary.

Of course, his gift is on her fingers.
The left hand, she likes it there.
Interlocked with his right hand, she looks at it.

She looks at it even as stays there, beside him.
She wonders, then hopes and then chides herself for being too foolish.

‘I must not get my hopes up.’

He kisses the top of her head.
He breathes the smell of her in- she smells salty.

‘From the running, no doubt. The sweat’

They just stole the coordinates to a worm hole.

And even as he and she both look at it, beyond the mahogany table with the flickering candle, against the wall; they feel only a sense of foreboding.

Like burnt dreams- very much unlike the burnt chips they just had (her fault, of course).

Because burnt dreams are very unlike the taste of burnt chips.
Setting fire to your own life, your own castles in the skies, pieces of heaven,

All for momentary if not rare or happenstance drops of ambrosia for the present.

But the petrichor can already be smelt and the dread of what’s about to happen is settling in.

They are giving up on their own lives to provide meaning to the false sense of security they’re being given- because it’s what they believe in. To die aware if not ignorant, because being aware can only make them united.

That’s what they hope.

‘I must not get my hopes up.’

Even amidst all the horror they are feeling, she continues to feel as if it’ll somehow all work out.
They’ll make it through the night.
Hell, he could even stay.

Or could he?

‘I must not get my hopes up.’

Finally he speaks-

“Funny that it’s a scroll- don’t you think?”

She looks up at the kindly face that says those words.
She breathes in how utterly silly that face looks, and she loves it, and yet she feels tormented.

She wants to push him away immediately because it’s dangerous to get any closer, but they already have.
She wants to drop her defenses and love him fully, with all her might, but she has already experienced pain and wishes she didn’t know the meaning of fear.

But she does.
All she feels - her hopes soaring dangerously and her heart welling up with dangerous, foolish love and she feels herself slipping down, down the rabbit hole.

“Yes.”
Is all she manages.
And then she looks up and tries to smile,
but ends up making an awkward face,

And says,

“You better make it back, Hugo. Even if it’s for one moment or one infinitesimal part of a second, you must make it back.”

He looks at her in surprise.

“Because although loving you is a complicated, dangerous business, I’d rather see you again than die having lost you forever.”

He smiles.
“That makes little sense.”

“I just want you back, you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Now go.”

The star globe suddenly brightened and the candle stopped flickering.
He got up.

They looked at each other.

They sniffed the petrichor that was so saddening, they parted their skin like it was so traumatizing.

And it could have taken a nuclear reaction to separate them barely a few days ago- with their friends cracking jokes about how the world would come to an end if they ‘broke up’- and how funny it was that now, the world would if they didn’t.

Not break up, but part.

And they parted.

He picked up the scroll containing the coordinates, and vanished.

It was unprecedented but it had the desired effect.

She burst out spilling salty water from her eyes which humans call tears- I call it the epitome of suppression.

Because even as she cried,

‘I must not get my hopes up.’

And that was the end of everything.
Or so she believed.

The forest of talking trees,
Had a daughter they loved and set her free.

The daughter, she went out far,
to distant lands, and to men with guitars.

Those men, they smoked something called weed,
She took a sniff, and then she fled the scene.

Her guardians had taught her long back
That anything that made her feel funny was bad.

For instance, the nectar of the bees,
it made rashes appear on her skin.

The bees, she recounted once,
to a traveler, she met on one of her runs.

She was running from the men with guitars,
and she told her friend, that bees preferred honey in their combs rather in jars.

Her friend, smiled at her,
he looked at her too plainly, as a vulnerable girl like a puny bird.

Guess he forgot the beaks,
of the birds, and how sharp they can be.

She ran from her ‘friend’ and ran
and thought of scouring even further lands.

Once she came across a sea,
the brilliant blue fascinated her being.

She heard someone call it a name,
She was confused, the brilliant blue hadn’t told her one then.

When she asked the brilliant blue, it said:
“My dear girl, humans name and in their minds they thread.”

“They thread names and pictures to make some sense,
And once they make enough of it, comes relief immense.

“For their puny brains,
Can’t handle not knowing pittance.”

The daughter of the talking trees,
Pondered over this.

Jumping up and down the stairs,
she thought of why a human even cares.

Caring for a friend once, she went as far as to a mountain,
the tallest mountain in all land, they called it in the known terrain.

She went to bury her friends’ remains,
and the mountaineer could not understand why it was of consequence.

The bees’ remains, she called it.
She explained gently that she ‘owed one to the bee.’

A phrase she’d learnt from her travels,
and as far as phrases go, there was another which quite unravels.

‘The stars quite dazzle,’
and she could not understand that as the coat against her she nuzzled.

Because stars, she knew, didn't shine for them,
It was for whom they loved, and for their friends.

She understood that humans couldn't believe
That even those stars they seemingly loved had in them a being.

She looked up at the stars floating on water once,
the Dead Sea, they called it, and they reported seeing a ghost that day once.

Floating on the water, they said
but it was only the daughter wondering how everything was made.  

She wondered the point of it all,
because the brilliant blue had told her humans wonder about it too, after all.

And she thought how it didn't have a point,
what was the need of making some sense, or a point?

If everything you saw was beautiful?
Wasn't that enough meaning after all?

Because beautiful things, and the workings and the ends,
all these human-ities, deserve to be experienced.

She thought of how beautiful the ball
and everything she’d seen was  after all.

The ball we live in, she thought
Maybe I could see it if I go on further and don’t get caught.

By these humans.

To this day the forest of the talking trees
think of their daughter as a passing breeze.

A breeze wonderfully so was she,
because they know, it was her that sent stars their way to look at and

To believe.

 

Ad Astra.

She whispers to the stars every night.
The soldier falls asleep looking at them.
In the same open field, fireflies fight to shine brighter than their brothers in the skies.

The child finds his mother's face among the stars.
The stars remind the lover of his beloved.
His beloved wishes upon a star every night;  for the soldier to return home.

She wishes her sister back as well-
little knowing that her sister has been enchanted by the stars; they speak to her as she deals with her brother-in-law's wound, whose body lays on the cold, hard ground, face upturned, drinking in the glorious night.
Drinking in the stars.

She whispers to the stars that night that she's afraid.
The stars console her. They tell her that soon enough, she'll come to them.
She lets a tear trickle down her face.
It falls on the soldier.
He smiles at receiving the tear of the star-whisperer.
Tears from the Land of Tears- a secret place.
He can't go there just yet.
He needs to get drunk first.
He drinks in the night; for he's unsure as to what tomorrow might bring.

The child tightly holds on to his aunt's arm, as she wishes upon a star again, the next night, miles away from the field.
Today he tries to look for a ghost among the stars.

But the stars seem dimmer.
And no dead man's face, nor a wish is to be found or heard, that night.

Because miles away lies two bodies.
Of a star whisperer and a man drunk on the stars.
And the stars seem to weep for the loss!
Of two humans they fell in love with. 

1.0

Cassidy was tired of feeling it.

She had always been a girl who couldn't very well explain her own thoughts, her ideas, the fragments that flashed in her mind.

She could not explain, but she could write, and write she did, in fact all she did do was to write- it helped her to think clearly.

But currently, she was feeling a weirdness in her that had come to define her life as of late. It felt as if all the noises around her had grown noisier, and they were screaming in her ear. Her throat was always parched, her senses were always clouded.

She could not understand what was going on. She was drifting.

Caught in a melee of madness, she could not resist.
And she went with the flow.