The Lives of Stars

by: Gracie Moore

The buildings hold a sea of stars. Each window is a burning universe, exploding slowly outward. Souls touch and tangle together. Even in the starving city that swallows individuals and spits out a crowd, a single fragile life trembles behind each light. I sit in the middle of the road at midnight, staring into the flickering sky that curls around me. A thousand nameless people, sobbing, laughing, empty, wrapped in light. I stare blurrily into their worlds, and sometimes strangers stare blurrily back.

After a thousand midnights, I survive till the sun stretches its sleepy fingers over the buildings, muffling the lights and blowing out the stars. I crawl into the telephone box as the crowd roars by, and my sobbing breath catches and carries through the sky into thirteen answering machines. I sat with my empty lungs and waited for the world to stop spinning. I knew now I would never go out at midnight again. My gaze had deconstructed a thousand buildings, inspected a thousand lives, and couldn’t even find a familiar shadow. I hated everyone for not being my someone. Loneliness sunk deep into my pores. Among the billions, I only loved thirteen. These loves were lost in the tangled sprawl and I was untethered and floating. The world was ending, and I didn’t have a hand to clutch.

The grief cluttered my lungs and clogged my veins. Trembling, I slept in the telephone box, a ragged pile of dust and bone. A corpse with a crowded living mouth. The telephone was silent, annihilating. The sun left its last scratches on the cement and then fell from the sky. At midnight, a girl wandered into the road, staring upward. I was blind to the windows, ignored the sky, but watched her scuffed shoes and shivering shadow, whispering their stories of loneliness. She seemed very small. Without noticing, I let go of the telephone.

I sat down beside her. “You can’t unravel the world,” I whispered.

“You don’t understand, I didn’t say goodbye.”

“Try calling. See if there is anything salvageable love.”

The girl sat holding her breath as the phone rang, then sobbed through eleven voicemails. We sat in the telephone box for another night and day, rumpled and broken-hearted. Then I took her hand. We walked slowly home and lit up our window.

I know that years from now, I will leave a voicemail on her telephone. I already know this story, and how time takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes and takes.