1
Star-crossed
All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.
—GALILEO
ORION: PRELUDE ??
The wind whips around me, rising into a roaring chorus as waves crash furiously against the jagged cliffside below. Even as the rain breaks and the sky clears, the misty air remains charged with a storm.
I hold the brass object between my thumb and forefinger, feel the balanced weight of it.
Sometimes, you have to lose something important to find it again. And you have to be willing to risk losing it forever.
There’s a cost to loving anything too fiercely. That only after losing what we love most can we truly realize its value.
It’s a cruel paradox.
With an aching breath, I lift my gaze toward the horizon.
Out there in the vast ocean is my violence. I recognized its fury before the ripples could reach me, before the vibrations could be felt. Like gravitational waves passing silently through one another, we were never supposed to collide.
That’s the law of physics.
My thoughts rage like the restless sea stretched endless before me, cast in tossing black waters that absorb the fading light. Two worlds layered one on top of the other.
In the distance, that faint seam of horizon threads the space where the ocean touches sky, blurring the boundary between the two.
You need the dark to see the light.
The waves push and pull against the shoreline as I stand fixed on the rocky ledge, the towering spires of Stonehurst looming from behind. I clench the brass in my hand, my fingers as numb with cold as my body with indecision.
Soon, a blazing corona will circle a black sun, the moment of totality eclipsing the beach.
And me.
Right here, trapped in this space between, I feel that push and pull on a cellular level as gravity mercilessly dominates my atoms. An inevitability that has tormented me since she first entered my orbit.
As crosses form on the shallow waters, the tide displays the mark of danger. The gravitational pull churns the tide higher, pulling harder at the ocean.
I recognize the pattern because the science of what I do depends on it. Inherently, we are designed to recognize these patterns. It’s coded in our DNA. To escape predation, to identify danger.
I should have recognized the danger in her.
With fire lashing my sternum, I remove the star-taker from my pocket and fit the piece into place, and her melodic tune sings through me, an intoxicating, haunting refrain.
Nothing is as perfectly measured as the symmetry of a reverberating tune.
Standing at the precipice, I step closer to the edge of the cliff. The waves roar, crashing higher, spitting up against the rocks. Something vicious stirs in my blood as I strip away my jacket and wrench off my tie, allowing the serrated wind to sink its teeth into my skin.
Gravity becomes secondary to this deeper, darker pull within.
With the next frigid gust, I pull in a shuddering breath. My foot slips along the rocky incline as I look down into the turbulent waters below.
I’ve suffered this moment on an endless loop.
There’s no fear of falling in space, only the silent terror of becoming adrift. Frozen, motionless.
