Her Constellations

The light was soft, painfully soft. The exquisite gold of the sunrise muffled our passion. I reached for her hand, but she pulled away, regarding her own reflection in the lake with clinical poise. I understood then, in the smallness of that single wordless movement, how I chafed her. My human smile, my human lips, my desperation; she ached for the clean emotions of love and hate. Our relationship was filthy and confusing. 

We sat on the edge of a round lake, surrounded by tall pines and implicit shapes veiled by the thick summer air. I grasped helplessly at hidden flowers.

I fell back onto the wet grass, the light had solidified, revealing the dull clarity of morning. “I find you beautiful, you know. Like a collection of unquantifiable stars I have tried to flatten into a constellation.” 

She turned to me, her perfect body hard.  She gestured to the rising sun. “I don’t understand your rhythm, let alone your metaphors. But I find you pretty, like a flower that, after a couple more sunrises, will wilt and die.” 

I crushed a blade of grass between my fingernails. “Well, that was a very matter-of-fact metaphor. Doesn’t the temporary nature of my existence make my passion all the more precious?” I tried to pass off my whine as a challenge. “My heart beats loudly when you kiss me. I know you feel my rhythm.” I hated the timbre of my tone: sickly, sycophantic.

She picked up a pebble. She toyed with the stone, then hurtled it into the unblemished grey water. “Find a lover commensurate. Someone with whom you can exchange heartbeats.” 

I pressed my head into the dirt. “A month, why would you endure me for a whole month, then cast me aside.”

“I found you pretty.”      

“I don’t know what commensurate means.” 

“Exactly, you must learn to understand your own proportions.” She smiled.  “I am portionless.”

“You are perfectly proportioned.” 

“Yes, I exist only inside your geometry.” 

“More like outside of it, you exist only inside our folktales.”

“Inside, outside.. the same thing” She shrugged dismissively.    

“No” I balked. “One is math, the other is… magic.” 

She approached the edge of the lake, against my better judgement, I followed her. She pulled me close, kissing me, then whispered. “I am an idealized abstraction. The moon will rise tonight, round and full. And I will leave you. I will go on dancing, singing, and eating.” She grinned.  “But you, with your math, with your magic, will turn this pathetic little world upside down.” 

I lowered myself onto the rocky shore; it hurt my bum. “We still have a day. You said once, in your enigmatic way, that you could show me secret curves, places with seasonless melody.”

She took my hand, wading into the lake. I shivered violently in the gentle cool of the water. We twirled. The bright morning faded into an empty, infinite grey.  “Do you see the stars? In my world, the constellations spiral. We hover, forever on the edge of night.”  I looked up. The stars were there. They were faint, but there. We had skipped the middle, jumping from dawn to dusk. She was right, she didn’t understand my rhythm. She defied it. 

“You look ridiculous, take your clothes off!” She commanded, laughing. “And fall.” 

I fell. I hoped she would catch me, but it was only the stars and their infinite arms, their spiraling constellations. Everything was perfectly round, dazzlingly delineated.” 

“It’s dark now, do you see the colors in the darkness? If we follow those colors, the mundane will fade away. Come!” 

I hesitated. I knew that by the mundane, she meant my world, my humanity. I longed to let the exquisite ache of a forever fragile perfection consume me. But instead, I splashed my face with lake water. “No!” 

“Only till the moon rises, then I will let you go. I’ll let you crawl back into your itchy skin.” 

“You don’t understand how easy it is for us humans to lose ourselves. Our freedom, our identity is reliant on our stubborn determination to be uncomfortable.” 

“Shh!” she hissed. “You’ll scare them away with your messy philosophy.” I followed her gaze, but I couldn’t see what she saw, only the last vestiges of summer sun. 

“What?” I asked. 

She waved me back in annoyance. “Quiet! Don’t hurt their wings!”  

She smiled, beckoning me close once again. “Quiet things, gentle things, innocent things, they sometimes float into your world. They don’t know any better.” She held up a finger in the air, tracing vague wings.” 

The life inside me tickled and a childlike exuberance for benign wonder unfolded. I still couldn’t see the creatures she was describing, but I imagined

big soft moths descending upon us, the kind of moths that dance at dusk in fairyland. Their curious eyes pulled my geometry from me.  Open and complete, I felt the first touch of moonlight. Looking down at my hands, I asked, “How will you fade away?”  

“I will follow the moths.” And there they appeared, as solid as I had imagined them, just as soft, just as terribly benign, just as magical. She followed them to the center of the round lake, to the center of the round moon and disappeared. The moths lingered for a moment longer, but they too faded. 

I thought briefly about trying to follow her, but I knew that I was too solid, not solid enough. She was gone. A pretty dream, not a beautiful one. I waded back to the shore, my wet clothes bundled under one arm. I grimaced. The rocks jabbed my feet as I, cold and lonely, rushed back to land. I dragged my heavy body onto the sand. 

I sat there for a while, regarding the darkness, the empty sky. I was keenly aware of the imperfections in my own skin, of the craters in the moon. The air had lost its thickness. No more moth whispers. The proud pines still had their majesty, though. And the lake still rippled with the movement of my body. I smiled at that. She didn’t understand the satisfaction of disruption, but I enjoyed watching my crude patterns evolve. I enjoyed watching the sunset and knowing with a feisty, passionate certainty that the next day would break me to pieces.