Asterisk*

Vigilance and Vulnerability*

*With full props to those who don't find those things scary as fuck

Through the thorns of the rose bushes,

The soft petals spread around,

A love and a kiss,

And then a prick and a hit.

But I'll survive that shit.

Apollo

The sun and the moon are always shown as polar opposites, fighting with each other for world dominance in a way that the stories will never let rest. You grow up seeing the blue and the red, battling over some sort of inner and outer strength that leaves comprehension out of the door. One of them is always portrayed as the evil one, and one with no faults. The truth is, we're all horrendous people, but it's up to us to see how much we can look past all the terrible deeds and accept the person for who they are.

Honestly, the sun and moon aren't at some crazy war that everybody thinks they are. The sun helps the moon, shining its light on the moon when it needs it. The moon revolves around the sun with the Earth, treating it like a celebrity like so many of us in the world do. All this for a solar system. It could be so easy to give up, yet something keeps it going. Something keeps me going, and I have no idea what the hell that is.

The night somehow manages to feel so much more peaceful that the day, even though in reality, it's probably not. As a kid, you think everybody goes to sleep after the clock strikes twelve. When you're awake, it feels like your little secret. There's something about it that makes you finally feel away from everyone's condescending stares, trying to pry you apart piece by piece. There's no one looking. You can cry your eyes out or watch that TV show you would never admit to watching. It makes you feel like a rebel in the smallest way.

Above everything, it just feels so much more personal to me. It's like the entire world ends in the room I'm sleeping in. Just me, my thoughts, and now the one person I was thinking about: Marcus. For a second, it feels like our night. The tiny miniscule details matter so much now. Only the moon, the stars, and us, under it all. Just a serene end to the day, not a blinding glare reminding us of the constant pressures of the world. Just like the stars, we could be free. Burning balls of hydrogen and helium that expand beyond what your eyes could ever see. If not that, some other crazy celestial metaphor that I could think up.

With the kiss, my night collided. Moon, sun, and stars all in one fiery ball of crazy renditions of things that I wish I could have experienced in the past. One cool rock called the moon cut through it all before we burn ourselves to the ground, inside and out. The gravity was pulling me towards him, yet again. But everything else was pulling me to the textbooks, where I currently was, trying to make some sort of sense out of the unnecessarily complicated wording in front of me. Nothing seemed to make sense to me anymore. I kept worrying that if I closed my eyes for just a second, I would never be able to make sense of this again.

"Hey, Apollo," Kyra whispered, entering the room and knocking quietly as Jinx followed suit. "How's it going?"

"Just studying," I responded, trying to give her a little smile while holding up my textbook. "It's not really helping."

"Well, good thing that we're here to help, huh?" Jinx told me, taking out some notes that he had in his bag.

"You don't have to do this. Really. Just enjoy your day or whatever," I said, feeling a bit overwhelmed by the fact they would be willing to spend their day like that. "I'll manage."