One night, you put on a hoodie. Something oversized, big enough to swallow you whole, to render you formless within the night. You put on trousers, thrice your size, but with the band modded to cling to your waist. 

It’s dark, and not just out there. It’s dark in your room too. Maybe the only place it really is dark, because there are lights outside, are there not?

Loud, grumbling lights, reluctant things forced to broach the dark, but only able to go as far as around them. Man-made, but phosphorescence still. Glorious lights that unstar the night sky, like a bad review. This night? Zero stars. 

We live in a world without stars, and so we flounder,  an entire race unable to chart a course home.

Out into this starless night you go, into the muck. There are dozens walking past you, dozens of bodies trailing –at your pace–, almost zooming past. Like cars and their exhaust fumes, they also leave a trail, of the day’s sweating done. Exhaust fumes from a hundred tired engines, engines ground down and worn out. Very much like the vehicles that propel them to and fro their dreams.

Here, the roads are filled with such engines, overworked and past condemned, vehicles held together by scrappy engineering and third rate hopes. Exposed wires within dented bodies. 

The vehicle does fit the man, no? 

Too, he is held together by hopes and the strings of his sinew. It is within this crowd that you now walk, a formless thing hiding from its own kind. Just one more engine tiring out. 

There is darkness in the room, and sure you convince yourself, “This is what I’m running from.” But where then are you headed? Your hopes and dreams are pasted on the walls of this dark room, waiting for your electricity division to power them. Just waiting for light.

On the street now, up your eyes go, and it is a starless night, and look at the moon all alone. 

She’s like a flower on a tree, the last one, holding out against the death of summer, of dreaming. You know there should be more, but there aren’t, all the buds are dead and fallen. Fallen to the soil and buried, spring is long gone. The moon’s alone, like the budding that announces the spring, the renewal of hopes. A promise of rebirth, singular but glorious for it, winter is gone, now comes life. This is what holds all the tired engines together, the lone moon in a starless sky.

But not you, not tonight at least.

Tonight you walk away from the dark of your room, the room with your dreams on the wall, because tonight you are unsure if it’s a womb, unsure if it’s a tomb.

So you run into the starless night, the road before you lit by the lonely moon. Before you a path to leave behind. 

Head bent, shaken loose by your footfalls and unobstructed by your spectacles (because what is there to see in a place without light? What is there in the dark but your fears?), your tears plop and splatter on the tar. The path is laid.

Before and behind you, they come. 

To womb or tomb, they tread your tears. 

They chart the fairy road home. 

Loneliness does a thing to a heart. 

no?