by Luna Lacour
“Do you love me?” he asked quietly.
I smiled, even though he couldn’t see it. We were both still drenched in obscure, ink-colored night.
“I do,” I said.
“Then will you do something for me?” He was breathless. A pause ensued. “Will you come with me?”
He flipped on the light, and for the first time since we had walked through the door, I felt as if I could really see him; not just the lovely face, but his whole being. The small slant of his hopeful smile; the stubble that shadowed his sallow cheeks. Or the way he leaned, reclined on his arms in a way that made the muscles tighten beneath soft skin. His lips, swollen and sweet.
Those two dark eyes. The same that I remember, with such a perfect clarity, wanting to know during that night of the masquerade. When he was still a stranger. When we were both just two masked faces, searching for the same thing.
He touched my cheek tenderly. I felt the first few tears of a warm ocean begin to flow.
“I think you’re a bit lost,” I told him. “Your real life is somewhere without me. Somewhere new, a clean slate. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
Will smiled. He kissed me slowly, his hands framing my face. I thought about the sky; the million dying stars that were slowly fading into the massive, cosmic blackboard. How everything seemed to have come together in a way that I wanted to believe, with my whole, healing heart - was fate.
“You’re wrong,” he said. “I know exactly where I am.”
If there’s one final thing you should know about this story, is that it ended with a game. A game involving two lives, coming together under circumstances both damning and reviving; consequential and undoubtedly life-changing. Heartbreaking, beautiful, and every emotion in-between.
It ended with a girl taking a man’s hand, and following him to a place where the grass sprawled over rolling mountain tops like a turquoise sea. Where there was an ocean that stretched for miles, and a small cottage in the hills. An open sky, an enduring hope; a new-found belief in something greater than what I could even possibly understand.
I had come so far, and the notion of each thing that existed beyond the threshold of my ungraspable past remained an orgiastic, incredible mystery. I do believe, in the depths of what I can reach, that this is perhaps the single thing that we can endeavor to discover; a mystery, a golden-glimmering life of our own.
It ended, some years later, with a ring; safely concealed in a velvet-lined box, with a single quote that I would wear forevermore, and ever more:
And the rest is rust,
and stardust.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Luna Lacour is a part-time author, full-time Theologian, and an avid reader of classic literature. She also enjoys music (namely punk), cinema (mainly drama), concerts, theater, documentaries (anything involving Louis Theroux) and classrooms. She graduated with her degree in Secondary Education: English with a minor in Religious
Studies.
A New England native, Luna currently resides in sunny Tampa, FL with her boyfriend and their two cats – Loki and Lazarus, respectively.
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