Counting the Stars

Chapter 7 - Darkness Ascends

"Listen here for a minute, Isabelle," Mom said gently, carefully taking my head in her paws and lifting it to allow my gaze to meet hers. "I want you to know something, okay? There is always going to be darkness in this world. There is no need to run from it or fear it, since it will never truly leave. So when the darkness ascends and dims the stars in your sky, all you have to do is have hope. Hope is like a beautiful little moth with dazzling wings of diamond. If you take care of it, look after it, and protect it, only then will it grow. And then, in time, it will find its way back to the light."

If there was any lesson in particular that my parents taught me that I still carried with me to this day, it was to always have hope. It didn't matter what the situation was or how I was currently feeling; if I had hope, I would always make it out alive and stronger. The whole world could have been crashing down on me, but if I had at least one little ray of hope, then there was a guaranteed brighter future waiting for me. I was told it was one of the most powerful things in the universe-- A close second to love, of course.

When the museum rejected my job offer, I lost my Bells, and Redd went missing, I thought that the world really was caving in on me. I thought that nothing would ever be right again and that my life had been permanently screwed up in just a couple of days. But even as the Bells in my storage room quickly disappeared from sight and within a week left my shelves bare, the thought that everything was going to be consistently bad from here on out wasn't sitting quite right with me, almost like I was purposefully lying to myself or it was simply a game of pretend. If there was anything I learned from my puppyhood, it was that nothing remained bad forever. And my situation didn't; eventually, problems were slowly working their way to solutions and everything was coming back into place.

With Redd gone, I found it safe to take the risk I had avoided so well before. Considering I had reached the point where I was unable to regain the Bells I was losing by myself, it was clear that what I needed most was help from the animals around me. I took my concerns to the discussion board where I had been directed to the museum, confessing that in a turn of events I had completely run out of Bells in a single week and was therefore unable to go on purchasing essentials for myself. I ended the statement by requesting the help I so desperately needed, worried that my situation would soon turn from bad to worse, and left the notecard on the board to wait for answers. And fortunately, it was a cry for help that was not ignored.

Before long, offers began to pop up out of nowhere from different animals residing in the town and even the campsite to provide me with some of the Bells I was missing. The overwhelming kindness and support I received in such little time from a single request was most definitely not something I had expected, and shortly, the shelves began to be filled again. A substantial weight was lifted from my shoulders to see such a massive dilemma in the process of being solved, finally accepting the fact that I was not going to be starving any time soon, and continued to live life as I had before I had this to be concerned about.

However, while I was receiving the financial support I required, I was no longer forced to find work. As the number of Bells steadily rose again, the need had begun to decrease, and therefore the pressure eased as well. The urge to apply for a job for Redd had also come and gone, considering that the demand to find work had lessened dramatically and it was soon clear that I had no way to reach him. The thought occurred to give him a call after he had mysteriously vanished from the town to try and grasp a clearer idea of what was happening, but being as clumsy and forgetful as I was, I had somehow already managed to misplace the slip of paper that held his phone number somewhere in my house. With the option to contact him unavailable, I fell back into the agreement I had made with myself to not push my commitment to searching for work to the extent of trying to work for him, but waited for his return nevertheless.