Amongst the Stars
BY JENNY CHEN
The girl who gave me the universe
In pale hands splattered with speckles of orange
Her eyes mirrored the blue painted into the sky at 7 pm
The time of the day when the last rays of orange burn along the edges of the mountains
Bleeding into watery, pastel cerulean and then expanding into a dark, dark indigo
Stars flickering to life in the east
That was the color of her eyes
A color so dark I could number the stars in them
Polaris
Sirius
Pleiades
When I was with her I could see them all
Her galaxy had collided with mine
And we were lost
Far from the Milky Way into the limitless beyond
We spiraled away from the humdrum of reality
Soaring through the bursting colors of endless space
We let our fingers trail through the stardust.
Laughing, as we flew light years away from banal Earth
We missiled straight through the blinding white center of the Andromeda
Lost in the wonders of simply being able to love
But a cross hung around her neck
Silky strands of trailing blond tangled in the cold metal chain
Every time we stepped an inch too close
The unrelenting sharp edges tore the threads of my hijab,
An eclipse, a dark hole in the sky so palpable
Not even the pastel clouds of the galaxies could hide
And so the unyielding gravity of our respective worlds pulled us apart,
Brought us thudding down from the sky back to our separate realities
At an acceleration of 9.8 meters per second we fell.
Back into the pulsing, dark pits of empty nothingness we fell
If only we could have lived out amongst the stars
Amongst the dark reds and pastel blues of the Rosette nebula
Soaring aimlessly through the skies doused with twinkling white lights
Where love is simply love
Nothing more and nothing less.
HYPERNOVA LIT 