In Clover 18+

Orion's Eyes: My Love from the Moon

I remember being a kid with hopes and dreams. I wanted to become an astronaut. I wanted to explore space and be able to reach the stars, and with a gap-mouthed smile, I proudly shared every aspiration piled in my frail arms with my mother.

That was the first time I felt my heart break, not figuratively, but literally. It shattered into pieces so sharp, I could feel it burn within my chest as tears seeped through, hoping to aid it. Father always told me that salt didn't heal wounds, but I hoped that mother would wipe my tears away before they started to hurt more, and instead ease my pain with a kiss.

She didn't, though. She told me that I did not need to think about my future. I already had one ahead of me and was wasting my time wishing to be anything other than who I was destined to be. She told me to stop whining and sent me off with my father, telling me that I could grow up to be just like him if I let them guide me.

Before I let my parents brainwash me into believing that Harrison Miller was an admirable man, I thought he was weak. I thought he was a mere dust crop for my mother to toy with because he was at her every beck and call. I never stopped to consider, at that age, that Father was forewarning me about finding a girl who would grow into the deceptive beauty that was my mother.

And that is what set it in for me. My father was not my mother's fool for fun. He was her fool for the sake of me. To protect me and make sure I didn't fall for the same foolishness that he did, and maybe it was her religious hypnosis that led him to warning me in all of the wrong ways.

But Clover wasn't my mother. Clover wasn't deceptive, and I could tell.

The day Clover was ripped away from me as a child, I had skipped inside my home with the clay sculpture she'd made for me in school. She was in elementary school while I was being homeschooled, or sometimes forced to sit in lectures with the high school students at Finewaters.

The first time I saw her, I was smitten. From the way her ponytail coiled over her shoulder in dark ringlets to the fact that outside of my mother and hers, I had never met someone of the opposite sex before.

She was taller than me back then. I was a short kid, and a bit chunky too, which threw my mother into a health craze. Clover never seemed to care, though. She was still my friend despite how upset my own mother felt about my appearance, and when I watched her parents drag her away from Naples, I lost the only person who seemed to care about me.

Clover and I were best friends. Our parents were close, and we would see each other with them, but they refused to allow us to be alone together. We couldn't directly play with each other, and we couldn't really talk to one another.

At first, we would watch each other from our windows and play with our toys together that way, until one night Clover suggested I sneak out. I listened to her, and it became a nightly routine for us.

One day, she gave me a clay moon painted in the same blue as her tilted eyes. She shared my love of astronomy, or maybe she lied to have something to talk with me about, but she always listened and encouraged me to do what I wanted to. She told me that my parents didn't dictate my future and suggested we run away together because she too was sick of her parents. Her younger sibling was being left to her whenever her parents wanted to leave, and she was getting annoyed.

I wanted to leave with her. I wanted freedom, to be me.

That night, directly beneath the apple trees in her backyard, Clover leaned over and pressed her lips to mine. She told me that kissing her meant that I was hers forever, but her parents took that away from her. From us, when they gave her a pill the next day and dragged her away from her house, screaming to be let go.

I screamed too.

I cried.

My mother was the one who found the moon a few weeks after Clover left. She asked me where I'd gotten it from, and I knew that for the sake of our religion, I couldn't lie. Clover was my friend—her Goddaughter, after all. She couldn't have been too upset, I assumed.

And, it seemed like, she wasn't. She just smiled and said, "Okay, it's pretty!"

But I was wrong. That night, I heard a thud from the hall. Something in my chest didn't feel right, so I bolted out of bed and ran out, only to see a dark, empty hall. I was confused until I walked further. Something crunched under my foot, penetrating my skin but not piercing it.

I knew exactly what it was. Someone, be it my mother or father, stomped on the moon that Clover gave me, leaving a dusty blue trail behind.

I always assumed that it had been my father. I could imagine him sealing his foot over Clover's beautiful eyes and shielding her from me until his foot lifted and she was left just tiny blue fragments of clay.

He was always the villain in my eyes. Never my mother.

I dropped to my knees and took the little pieces of clay, and ever since then they had been kept in an old mint case. It never lost the memories, both peaceful and painful. It never dulled the colors of Clover's blues.

I never wanted to lose sight of those beautiful eyes again. Never, and that's why I forced myself to find the smallest bit of confidence. I sat in my room and practiced for hours how to talk to Clover without a stutter, how to maintain eye contact...how to express my feelings without having to say it—because no matter how much confidence I was able to scrape up, verbally telling her that I was obsessed with her was far too much.

Inviting her out was something that I'd done on a whim. I wasn't prepared, and I didn't know why I did so, but I was glad.

I am glad.