Before this moment, I have never whished to be something other than what I am. Never felt so keenly the lack of hands with which to touch, the lack of arms whith which to hold.Why did they give me this sense of self? Why allow me the intellect by which to measure this complete inadequacy? I would rather be numb than stand here in the light of a sun that can never chase the chill away
My breath catches, responding to an unfamiliar pull in my chest, an ache in my soul. I shouldn’t miss him, but I do; this boy who had every right to pull that trigger, and instead threw himself between me and death. This boy, the only one who believes I’m not what they say I am what I believed I was; a soldier without a soul, a girl with no heart to break. He’s the only one who’s proved me wrong.
We see them as they cannot, will not, see each other--we see his heart in the way he looks at her; we see her soul calling out for his every touch. It would be so easy if they could only see inside each other as we can.And yet, there is beauty in the way they find each other: slowly, in a fragile dance of sidelong glances and accidental touches. To see them come together, souls binding without knowing each other as we do, without being certain of what the other's heart holds, is to learn something new...Faith.
Interviewer: So. Tell me about your mother.Ezra: You're taping this, right?Interviewer: Audio only. Camera is faulty.Ezra: Okay, well for the benefit of the sight-impaired, I am now raising my… oh, dear… yes, it's my MIDDLE finger at Mr. Postgrad here.Interviewer: Mr. Mason...Ezra: Now I'm wiggling it.Interviewer: Terminating interview at 13:58 on 03/19/75.Ezra: Look at it wiggl--audio ends-
He’s as tense as I am, maybe even more so, but it’s so hard to reconcile that with the serenity of weightlessness. His faux-blond hair is floating out away from his head. He’s wearing a worn, much-mended, and too-large shirt his friend in town must’ve found for him to help him blend in. He looks nothing like the Romeo who dragged me off the base, nothing like the Cormac who threw himself between his own people and me. It’s like that guy’s gone, and I killed him.
I listen to his heartbeat. Hear him breathe. As though becomes motion and motion becomes all that lies between him and his end. As the black Is burning blue with the light of tiny funeral pyres. As his missiles and bullets take away his enemy. All they were and will ever be. I can taste it in his whispers. See it in the tiny photograph he has taped to his console. All he thinks of amid this loveless dance. All he cares about here on the edge of forever, is her. He does not want to die. Not because he is afraid. Simply because of he cannot bear the thought of leaving her behind. And there, in that tiny moment, I envy him.
The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars come out, slowly at first and then all together, diamond-bright, each one a new world to discover.But no matter how long the girl looks, she feels nothing. Puzzled, she looks for the girl who wanted to be an explorer, the girl who wanted to learn deep-sea diving and mountain-climbing, the girl who wanted to travel the stars. But she can't find her. That girl died when her parents did, in a little shop in the slums of November. And now she has no soul left to shatter.She closes the shade over the window.
The glow flares bright—bright as the billion-year-old light around us. Bright as a sun.Almost every particle in the universe was once part of a star.First, hydrogen condensing and collapsing, bringing radiance to the void.Furnaces burning bright, then fading, giving all they had left back into the cosmos.Carbon and oxygen. Iron and gold.Vast clouds swirling with their own gravity. Coalescing and disintegrating.Generation to generation.The remnants of stellar alchemy, stirring into life, then consciousness.Crawling from the oceans. Taking to the skies.And from there, back to the stars that birthed them.A perfect circle.