Somewhere in the Cosmos

In one of the stars, I shall be living. In one of them, I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night... You - only you - will have stars that can laugh. 

When your eyes turn red with weeping, when you lie in your bed at night and you think of those who have gone, then let yourself dream of a place where the stars are singing - they're laughing, and you know that somewhere, there's someone watching – but the stars don't tell you who.

There was once a time when she had a name. It didn't matter what anyone else called her, for she could have been any name at all; could have become an animal of any kind, and yet she knew that there was something about her that made her unique; made her different from everyone else. That was the way she thought, anyway. She had always known it, and she had always tried to ignore it. She couldn't bear to think of herself as just another person in the world, and so she never did. 

But now – years ago, or perhaps even decades – she finally understood what people meant, after seeing how other people reacted when they heard her name. 

There was no love in their words, no warmth in their gaze, not the slightest touch of compassion; just pity and fear, like some strange combination of pity and fear. 

They would whisper, 

"What is it like? Is it really like that?" 

They might ask,

"What it's like to live with such loneliness, perhaps solitude as you call it, if you lived that way?"

 Every time they asked her this question she would say nothing. 

She wanted to cry sometimes, wanting so much to explain how lonely she was – why she had chosen solitude over being touched, loved, cuddled, held – but no matter how much she said things, no matter how many times she spoke up and begged to understand, to talk about anything, it seemed to do no good. 

So she stayed silent instead, because what she needed most in her life was understanding, and that was the one thing she could never get. And when she looked at the sky at night, she saw nothing of the stars, only an empty sky full of darkness. The emptiness made her sad; filled her with guilt; made her want to run away. 

But running away wasn't an option. Running away was dangerous; ran away often led to pain, hurt feelings, rejection. So she simply stayed put and waited; waited until it was safe. 

And then left the house, went anywhere that she could go alone – anywhere that didn't remind her of what she felt, or couldn't feel. 

Sometimes it was raining; sometimes it wasn't. It never seemed to matter, and yet it bothered her more than anything else; rain or shine, there was always something wrong. She had seen the clouds come down before, when she had still been a child, and though it was impossible to make out the shapes they had formed, she remembered the feeling as if it was a very vivid memory. 

The storm always seemed to follow her, wherever she went. When she closed her eyes she could see raindrops falling from the sky, striking on her skin and sticking there until they ran dry. Sometimes she wished she could fly away from the thunder, the lightning, the rain. 

Once, when she was eight years old, she had gotten lost. Lost in the forest, lost in her own mind. She found a place where the ground sloped upwards into the air, like the roof of a cave, and climbed up, hoping to find shelter. After she got onto the ledge of rock and started climbing again, however, she began to lose hope again. 

The ground sloped downwards, further and further, until the ground disappeared altogether and she fell through endless darkness, until the cold and the damp wrapped themselves around her and pulled her in.