Prose by Erica Leal

Edited by Cynthia Wang

Every night, she watches the stars illuminate the night sky as specks of white glide across the dark landscape. For as long as she can remember, she’s loved its beauty. No matter your place in the world, you could always admire the burning lights: a universal love letter to the world. 

She closes her eyes and murmurs a wish, hoping that one of these nights, it might just reach a star. She hopes that perhaps she has a confidant lingering in the cosmos, listening to her midnight confessions and late-night worries– someone holding onto her secrets, hopes, and dreams as if they were their own. Someone who would never judge, never leave. Someone different. 

Thus, when the sun returns each morning, she can’t help her disappointment at the loss of her friend. Unlike the rest of the world, the light was no longer her symbol of hope. Instead, her savior emerged from shadows, covered in stardust. Each day that followed was thus spent eagerly awaiting his return, longing for the mysterious stranger that had become so tempting and familiar. She hoped that he would engulf the sunshine, allowing the constellations to illuminate her world once more. 

Because the beauty of the stars, she realized, was the way they hugged the darkness behind them. A tag team of nature, never one without the other. The world is sometimes a little too heavy, she thought as her eyes scanned the midnight sky, so why would you shine alone when you’re brighter together? 

Thus, each night, when the world went quiet, she laid awake. In the dead of the night, her heart bloomed with delight, for she was finally seen, finally heard. Under the blanket of shimmering lights, they traded secrets, her soul falling into his orbit like binary stars. In the peace of twilight, awake until the earliest hours of dawn, she remained by his side, finding solace in his company. A child of the moon, she loved him in silence. For, she found that in her silence, he had no end.