Hell On Earth

eighteen | let's try this whole thing again

It is tonight.
Quite frankly, I'm terrified.

It's about nine or so.

Luke and I are leaning on the rail of his balcony, looking up at the stars.

I'm smiling. "Did you know that moments like these are some of my favorite things in the whole world?"

He looks over at me. "How so?"

I shrug. "Well, it's always peaceful. No hallucinations, no stresses, just you and the night sky."

I glance at him.

His smile is laced with sadness and something like regret. "This is the first time I've really been able to appreciate the stars."

I look back up at them, my expression probably awe. "Well, here's to a new first."

"Colina."

That is the first time Luke's used my real name.

And that is when I look over at him again and realize just how terrified he is to share his story.

In life, you'll have about five or six really defining moments where your story stars to mean something.

Shakespeare had a sonnet about it, I think. Or maybe it wasn't a sonnet. But it was called the Seven Stages of Man. It spoke about, well, the seven steps of life. The first two lines were "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

It means that the world really isn't that significant; there probably exist others just like it. We people are a pinprick on a map.
Nothing.

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

We are nothing.

Normally, I love Shakespeare, especially his Hamlet play, but here, I think he's wrong.

We do mean something.

We mean something to maybe just a few people or maybe to a whole lot.

I might tell a funny joke, and someone who overheard it retells it and confesses he heard it from this girl at the grocery store.

Or maybe your meaning is something more significant than one humorous joke.
Maybe you touch someone's life so significantly that even when they leave you, you remember some little detail about them, like how their smile was a little wonky or the fact that they could never sit still or how you could see a world hidden behind their eyes, a million stories to tell but no one willing to stop and listen.

There is beauty in everything.
In the crash of the waves on the beach, the cry of a gull, the perfect crunch of a leaf under your shoe, the smooth gleam of a pretty rock after you dunk it in water, the way the sunlight streaks in rays through the bright green trees, the rain pouring down and turning everything grey but making the morning after smell like petrichor, the flowers that come in the spring, the way the moon and the stars shine brightly, even when you can't see them.