Those Who Walk Alone At Night

Prologue- Who walks alone in the streets at night?

Those who walk alone at night (the sleepless, the sad, the bad, the mad. The lost, the lonely. The homeless.) all remember when they came together, weary of words and people, reeking of heaven or hell at midnight, and all wondering with what nothingness should I fill this empty space?

They got caught in each others gravity, pushed and pulled until they were colliding, still on fire, becoming one instead of breaking, with ribcages like the rings of Saturn. But rather than coming together, it was like returning to a whole, as if they had always been made out of the same universe and were each other's missing constellations.

As if they were a way for the cosmos to know itself.

They tried, in vain, before they had found homes in each other's chests and mouths, to fly away, like Icarus, going on to find profane words scrawled black across the sun, only to be asked; how many times will you travel? And for how long? And for what dream? If you return one day, for which exile shall you return, which exile will have brought you back?

Their nostalgia and leftover stardust created a non-existent country, with laws alien to earth and man, that none of them can escape, nor wish to, because they had finally found a place in which the language spoken is one they understand.

And so they all chip it into the blue paint of truck stop bathroom stalls, write it on sidewalks with abandoned chalk, etch it into rocks on beaches and carve it into trees. They leave it on graffiti walls and in guest books at roadside attractions, carve it into motel chair legs and headboards. They write it out with sticks in the sand, etch it into yellow plastic playground slides, scrawl it in sharpie on door jams in alleys.

They leave their names, their name, just to let the world that didn't see them know that they have been found among the other fallen stars.