Fragments of Memories

You always loved the stars.

I remember the thousands of ways your eyes sparkled as you stared at them, pupils glistening islands of awe, diamonds of constellations drowning in your honey irises. The way your breath hitched in admiration as the night parted the suspended pearls of white nebula to reveal an ocean of glimmering jewels set into a sky so dark, it silenced the world, searing it all away until all that was left was you and me.

You and me.

Staring at the heavens that blessed us with the myriads of color and light that enthralled you so much. That vibrant vortex of the ether, so void of life, so empty, so cold, so plenished with beauty. Every curve of every pattern embroidered in the obsidian tapestry rich in the memories we shared, dripping in the faint whispers of the past, a spectral chorus of a hundred lives lived long ago.

You always loved the moon.

I remember your laugh, a bubbly melody of pure gold, where each note made me melt into the music of your song. As the ghostly sails of the waxen crescent moon voyaged across the sky in an untraceable path, concealed to all but the gossamer wings that drove the pearly echo of the sun, you would call out to me in that crystal harmony of your voice, every vowel graced by a delicate vibrato. And I still remember the way your face gleamed adulation and wonder at the dancing white butterfly in the sky. It was magical.

You always loved the shadows of the night.

The watered-down glimmers of sunlight, a simulacrum of the scintillating gold of the day. But I never understood why. The stars were shards of shattered light that sliced through the black flesh of the firmament, frosting the dark fabric in a fountain of wounds. They were cold. They were empty.

“They glisten with the forgotten history of every soul they have ever laid eyes on,” you would murmur. “They are fragments of the past. They are fragments of memories.” What a poet. You could turn the most grotesque into the most gorgeous with a few effortless words upon your silvery tongue.

“What about the moon?” you would whisper. What about it? The moon was bloodless. Ashen. A broken reflection of the charismatic sun. Yet you always gave it color. You gave it life. Its sickly pallor was the ghostly songs of faded memories. Its dull composure was the gate to the heavens. Its melancholic shape was the epitome of a healing heart.

“A petal plucked from the rose of the sun,” you would breathe, a susurrate of silky syllables that to a watchful stranger appeared common words from a common mouth, but to me… they meant more than you can ever imagine. Every rustle in your velvet voice was a silvery concerto blossoming in the orchestral accompaniment that was your eyes, your hair, your lips, your passion, your ambition. It would crescendo into a golden symphony of serenity as I forgot all my worries, as you washed away every knot that creased itself into existence in my body.

Still.

I didn’t love the stars. I didn’t love the moon. I didn’t love the snaking veins of shadow that coiled and churned, dancing a somber ballet, around the invisible corners of the night sky, bleeding darkness into the horizon. I loved the sun. I loved the ocean. I loved the skies painted in a plethora of blue hues whose slobbering mouth craving golden power, met the sea at the horizon, kissing endless expanse of viridescent-blue. An ocean that appeared angelic, a portrait of peace, surface glittering tears of sunlight; twinkling treasure, delicate fingertips caressing golden shores, the hem of its turquoise robes skirting the hulls of glistening mahogany ships of silky cotton sails. An ocean that was truly infernal, versatile, effortlessly metamorphosing into a deadly labyrinth of gnarling chaos, wet, black tongue gnashing, starving mouth gluttonizing, guzzling the flesh of victims it lured far from familiar land with the singsong promise of freedom, engulfing them into the depths of its stomach.

But now, I can’t see anything the same. You changed me more than you can ever imagine. I see the sun, a blossoming inferno of luminescence, golden light pouring through the nuances of blue, high above, a drowning eclipse suffocating with life; but in its place, I see the moon; I hear your voice. I see the beams of brilliance as spectral moonlight, seeping through the nebulous mist of the night, a ghostly touch of phantom light upon my cheek. I look at the thundering crashing of royal blue waves, foam of gilded-white, hissing with each fiery touch, but in its place, I see cascading showers of stars tumbling across the sky in a shimmering river of pearly apparitions.

You are everywhere, your face etched into the sun, your laughter a delicate film of burbling embers frosting the surface of the sea. And even if I didn’t love the silver jewels of the darkness that your heart adored; I still loved the way your face illuminated in the incandescent excitement of living vicariously through the fragments of memories that clung to the gentle slopes of the pendants in the sky. Because while you loved the stars, the moon and the umbra of the night, while you fell in love with the shadow of the sun, I fell in love with the sun that made its echo shine so bright. I fell in love with the light that gave the moon its beauty.

You.

The person who blessed the silver smudge with life, with heart, with color. The person whose soul melts for the glittering elements of the shadow realms. The person who whispers the stories of the stars.

I loved you.

I loved you.

I loved you.

And you completely shattered my world.

Before you, I knew stability. I knew clarity. I knew harmony. But you tore my reality apart. You tipped the balance of my life into a whirlwind of feverish pandemonium that fogged my mind with mist of thick delirium, until I could not see straight, could not think straight.

Before you, I used to relish in the dark, letting the murky obscurity envelop me in its deathly embrace, tangible arms clawing at my sanity. The shadows cast by the sun; I was them. I was darkness. But you… you were piercing. You were scathing light that burned away everything I knew in a blistering torrent, until all that was left was you. Until all that was left was crimson passion. Idyllic adoration. Poison.

Because you destroyed me.

Because you could never love me.

Because you and I were so different.

As different as moon and sun, as silver and gold, as night and day. The rivers of your soul glittered pearly diamonds, mine were pendants of fiery ambers; the threads of your heart sewn from the light of the moon, mine from the ardor of the sun. But the polarity of these empyrean jewels is but a myth, a myth even your eyes could not decipher. They are each other’s destiny. Not nemeses. They burn for one another, chasing each other for eons at sunrise and sunset, sunlight obliterating moonlight, moonlight eclipsing sunlight. A tango of fire. And just like the sun and the moon, I will chase you for eons more, because for me, there is only you.

But for you, there was never me.

My cold heart bloodied and bruised by hatred softened at your touch, but I was never good enough to change it for you. So I watched in broken misery as you stared at the stars, as you laughed with the spirits of the moon. Without me. And now I get to watch you dancing with them. I see your form in the constellations, your curly hair, your eyes of golden caramel, brazen and silky smooth, milky with diamonds as you left me and became one with the heavens. Suddenly, I see the life you described. I see the patterns in the façade of the moon. I can hear the melodies of the past. I can feel the memories of the stars, chasms of emotions, dancing, alive on my skin, the tendrils of your unrequited love.

Because you see, you were everything to me. You are oceans in my pearly memories; oceans I drown in every twilight as a tempest of stars pirouette across a night sky. But to you, I was a fragment of a memory; a whisper of another life, whose feeble essence barely comprised a droplet in your thoughts. It was excruciating.

Because you see, my love for you broke me and carved me hollow, it consumed my heart with fire, it contorted me into a state of writhing agony, it left me screaming.

And yet, for you, I would do it al l again.