Fallen Stars

Prologue

A little girl and a little boy share a dream together. They have never met before. They don't even live on the same planet. But every night they dream about the same place, an endless field in a world where the loudest sound is the rustling of tall yellow grass in a gentle breeze.
They share a little cabin together, and at night they sit on the roof and watch the brilliant starry sky, totally unpolluted, a sight neither has experienced more than a handful of times in the waking world.
They barely talk. They don't have much to talk about. They speak the same language, but the boy's speech is elegant and refined and straight to the point, while the girl knows a lot of words the boy doesn't, but pronounces most of them wrong.
The boy spends his afternoons playing the violin, while the girl reads books from the big shelf in the living room.
“What are you playing?” she asks.
“Just practicing,” he says, with an uneasy tinge to his voice.
“You don't need to practice so much,” she says. “You're already really good!”
He shakes his head.
“I can't just be good. I need to be perfect.”
“Why?”
He sighs, exasperated.
“You don't understand.”
“I guess I don't.”
“Why do you read so much, anyway? Don't you forget the words when you wake up?”
“Yeah, I do,” she admits. “But then I remember them again when I fall asleep.”
“Then how do you pass your classes?”
“What classes?”
Then the conversation fades, and they go back to the quiet comfort of not really knowing each other, and yet tacitly understanding each other in a way that makes perfect sense, but that neither could ever hope to explain.
In the dream, no matter what they're doing, the boy is always dressed in an elegant tunic, and the girl is dressed in little better than rags. In the waking world, they would scorn each other for this. But in the dream, things like clothing or status don't seem to matter so much.
Only that they're not alone, that they can watch the stars together and enjoy the company of someone who doesn't judge, doesn't expect anything from the other, is content to simply coexist beneath the starry skies.
The dream repeats itself for many nights, but as time passes, it fades, becomes a vague thing, consigned to memory.
The little girl and the little boy have grown up. Their lives are hard, each in its own way, and there is precious little time for dreaming.
But in their quietest moments, separated by hundreds of stars, there are brief flickers where the little girl remembers the little boy, and the little boy remembers the little girl, and each silently wishes the other could exist.
And then the moment passes, and life goes on, and the dream is almost forgotten once again.
Almost.