In the moon’s dreams, it danced with a girl.
It was different than dancing with the sun. The sun was always out of reach, lonely whisps curling ribbons that were snipped by jealous comets. They were spinning in beat with a voiceless melody, the absent tune swallowing the space between everything and nothing.
Everything and nothing between them.
Touch me. The sun whispered. You are cold.
Cold. Cold. So cold.
It was cruel, was it not? The moon longed to taste fire. But breathless winter was its home. If the moon stopped loving its freezing craters and threw itself into the sun, who would be left to stay with the eternal snow? Oh yes. There was snow on the moon. A kind of snow that never fell. A kind of snow that could not be held. A kind of snow that the moon cried on nights and mornings when the sun danced with the asteroids.
It was different dancing with the girl. Softness feathered her lashes like a promise of something similar to spring, the red of her lips a poem written in a language the moon had never seen before.
Her fingers traced the moon’s memories, oddly in tempo with the new melody playing softly in space. The moon leaned into her, searching for a flame that would burn a leaf, but spare a forest.
Yet she was cold. The moon sighed a sigh of haze and fog, disappointed in the absence of temperature and its absentminded sweet-nothings. Should there not have been warmth on the girl? To the moon’s dismay, her skin was not soft, her skin was not heated with the blazen rivers of blood and flesh. It was hard. Unyielding. Cold like an autumn breeze… Though unlike a frozen lake. Cold and hard like glass.
Like glass.
Like glass!
Leave me. The moon anguished in its dream. You are fragile. You are cold.
The girl merely smiled, as sure in her steps as she had ever been. Her glass feet created ripples in the ground, dispersing sparks and twirling in puddles of a thousand beaming orbs. She threw her head back, laughing into the sky adorned by petals that had lost their way home.
My feet used to bleed. The girl hummed. Glass does not bleed.
And so the moon danced.
A land blanketed by stars.
A sky spilled with flowers.
A girl of glass.
How the moon wished it would never end! How it wished the blossoms would continue to rain, smothering the darkness, soaking up the ice.
The moon’s heart was a lighter, and a flick of the girl’s finger ignited a flame that burned pale and ghostly, reminiscing of a future that would never come to pass.
The flame wavered. It sputtered. It gasped. The roaring thrummed with the music, threading itself into the haunting melody the moon so adored.
Alas, the fire should never have touched the girl. Or perhaps it was what she had been seeking.
The moon wept as, with a cry, the girl broke. She burned and cracked, bursting in a shower of violent freedom that silenced the murmur of emptiness and desolation—a sea of broken glass shards indistinguishable from the stars that grieved and rejoiced. But even the fallen petals from the sky could not console the moon.
I could not answer the moon. I could not answer why the lost memory pierced more than the watery reflection of desire.
Flesh bleeds. But glass shatters.
And the moon is so cold.