TK JOHNSON

He came after the moon began to dip into the horizon, into a great, green bed painted grey, into a cacophonous lullaby of jungle life. It was open here, all the way to stars he had never seen in all his travels, that winked down at him and his meager mortality through pinholes in the black veil of the sky.

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It was open here, all the way to those stars, all the way to his head, all the way to his heart.

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He fidgeted and leaned back on shaking forearms, craned his neck up, up, up until his back arched and his neck ached, and he traced the embers that climbed the sky. In that moment he dwelled…could those embers touch those stars if they wished for it?

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Ha.

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What a poor poet he proved to be…but that moment stretched into many, into an eternity of embers collapsing under their ambitions in the somber light of a sinking moon. Would his love look like that? Would it burn through him, char and crumble his skin, sear and surge and swallow him and blink out with a breath of cold reality? Was he struggling into the sky and would he die if he could not reach it? Reach her?

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Would those same stars grow more distant?

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The tears fell freely here, as surely and silently as the swollen moon into a sea of tangled trees.

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He thought on her, on her heat, on the ferocity of her own love. If any one of them could fly, could reach that veil and peer beyond the peephole into eternity, she could. She was a star, his star, his true north.

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He was just a torch.