Little Light

Clouds of Gas and Dust

I've lost track of time now. I couldn't tell you the day (was it Sunday?), the date (November 6th?) or how long I'd slid into this depression.

You feel like you're missing something. An arm and a leg. Distance is expensive like that. You feel like you're missing something vital, something important, something essential and you've misplaced it during a drunken episode.

It's only when you're sober that you realise that you can't remember anything.  And then what do you do? When the pit of solitude begins gnawing at you, like a dog with a bone and there's shiny white sharp teeth that gleam harsher than the dull reality that awaits.

I always thought that she was the brave one. The one that sought adventure and excitement. She blazed like a roaring fire and compared to her I was nothing but ash and cinders. She was the courageous one, the one that held other's gaze and challenged their promises. She had a thirst for knowledge, she treated life like a quest.

And here I was, wasting away.

I always had the idea that we had been brought together for a reason. I kept her grounded, stable. She kept me alive and kicking. I thought our love was written in the stars, I'd long given thanks to the universe that allowed us to find each other.

Call me naïve and innocent. Tell me I know nothing of love. Tell me that I'm too young to experience it, too young to understand it. Tell me that there will be other lover's and childhood sweethearts don't always turn into adulthood lovers. Tell me that love is fleeting and temporary and that I'm deluded.

I still wouldn't believe you.

This is what love is though isn't it? When you stay with someone no matter what because you love them. When you love them even if they're on the other side of the world. I always thought that love was something to be proud of, something that you woke up smiling about because you realised how lucky you are, to have someone in your life that is worth missing. That the moments that you share, the love, the tenderness, the softness and that feeling of home is worth the fighting, and the tears, and the pain and the doubt.

But you can't love others without loving yourself. And others can't love you without loving themselves. Love is a give-take relationship. It's not all fluffy socks and tea. Sometimes its smeared lipstick and screaming until you can't breathe.  Love isn't selfish you know. If it was, we'd all be classified as abusive for taking it until the other person had nothing left to give.

Stars form from clouds of gas and dust and rely on gravity to keep themselves together without being ripped apart. She was my gravity and I was falling apart without her.

Because when you're the same composition of elements, you get used to it. You get used to making the same compounds and anything else is alien. You don't feel right, you feel new, strange and unfamiliar and unrecognisable.

Who is Elara Lyles? Who is she without Leda Winters?

The answer is simple really.

Just another lost moon orbiting a planet that had nothing to give. Just another satellite in the same orbit around the same rocky surface.  

Never changing, never seeing anything new.

Just there.

Alone in a vacuum.