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But their words had become blood. Life. Words bruised like aubergine.

Maps do not have a beginning or an end. They start where you stand. And end where you fall.

Above me, the sky hangs low like a dreamcatcher. The clouds interweave and shapeshift into the characters in my head: a dragon of possibility, the puppy I longed for, bounding and free.

At night I would lie in the garden and trace the lines between stars. My father, back when there was such a man, called them constellations. I knew they were more. Promises of tomorrow. The beginnings of tales and adventure. Sentence stems of possibility.

too old for excuses

too young for any value

Somewhere in my pre-memory, I think I believed that if I could name them all. Orion, Centaurus, Crux...I would always find my way home. There would always be a way back.

Life was simple then. The dark only meant somewhere new to look.

She holds the shards close.

A metaphor just for one,

As she stands alone.

And look I did, barefoot and strange each night I wandered in silence to the pond under the mountains.

Riverjoy—-10/07/2024 5:50 am

Hahah and mogs will let the other two take care of it while mogs does what mogs does best.

Which is stick his paw in your face while we chat

Celiainunderland — 10/07/2024 5:53

And Mogs'll just offer himself as a sacrifice for the greater good Or just fuck of 'till its over

I would like to believe the former...unlikely though TBF

I would sit on the crumbling dock that was forgotten before we started naming constellations and hang my toes in the almost frozen water. The nights were clearer then, especially when the air was arctic.

Somewhere between birthdays and betrayal, I stopped looking. The spaces between the clouds no longer held potential- suspended and oscillating with unnamed energy. They were just voids. Loss and emptiness. And the silence that would come.The cold too had learned to bite.

once i looked into your eyes

and whispered

i cannot grow up

Potential lost, the ground inevitably became so much more interesting.

Or rather, for the sake of survival. I felt I should sew my feet into the soil like a good citizen of the world. My transformation from star beast to earth child was neither good nor bad. For I had followed the path of the stars to get here. I was now more like the frigid water than the lights in the sky. Even when the warmth of spring came, the ice was curled up in my chest.

Still. Calm. Deadly. Almost.

A darker shade of purple.

But.

not like a bruise-

outlasting the pain

More,

Vivid.

Softer.

Still,

like the sky,

after a storm.

Knotted and looped like a rope tethering me to my place. Watching from the inside out. University. Classes came and went. The stars still refused to form shapes, but they were there, waiting to be joined into a constellation of our own. Then there were jobs. Many and few in between. Always moving. Tracing circles in the sand.

There were people too. Lovers, friends, the earthbound faithful. Enemies even. All tracing circles in the sand. The stars faded further into distant memory. But they were there.

the dark was better

they could see in the light

who would want to see in the light?

It became a delicate balance, remembering the stars. I dealt little bits of myself as a trade off for the humanity of others.

They took happily. Smiled easily.

I asked the same question of the people over and over again, do you also remember?

I wondered often if I would find someone else who used to look at the stars and know the spaces in between them were terrain to be filled. Someone who remembered them still. Like water through weathered fingers. In muscle memory. In the taste of honey stirred into warm tea.

It was not quite a burden to be the only one to remember , but it was a lonely endeavor. I walked the path the stars had laid out for me so many years before, in my fathers garden, when there was such a man.

river — 09/07/2024 2:27 am

I'm not even at the what have we done stage anymore. I'm more at the nothing makes more sense than this stage.

Celiainunderland — 09/07/2024

Yeah. You literally took a sledgehammer to every wall I'd built .-Like meticulously, Brick by brick. There wasn't no fucker getting in.

Tuesday, 9 July 2024 2:31 am

And now I'm a jibbering wreck all vulnerable and shit

Tuesday, 9 July 2024 2:32 am

and that's very disconcerting

river — 09/07/2024 2:32 am

It was unintentional and same im more vulnerable with you than I've ever been with anyone else in my life

It made me realize just how many walls I put up

Celiainunderland — 09/07/2024 2:33 am

Same

river — 09/07/2024 2:33 am

And I feel raw and vulnerable and all sorts of out of sorts but I think I'm becoming sure of one thing. You.

Celiainunderland — 09/07/2024 2:33 am

And I am not planning on taking them down. One's enough x

So we bled through the phone,

across miles

and oceans,

before finally

holding hands in waiting rooms

and cheap hotels,

snatching kisses in the back of taxis,

There in the light of the moon, my feet still sewn into the cooling earth, the almost frozen water lapped at my still bare toes. She was there staring at the space I knew to have stars. She said: focus. I wrote back: follow the light

Her voice was soft like jasmine but edged with the thorn of a rose.

It took a long time to reach her,

The stars played tricks.

The spaces in between the clouds laughing at the folly of it all. The silly games humans play.

If only they knew that the map had been there all along if only they had looked up once in a while. The ground was no place for dreams. No matter how they came.

the after

when your fingers paint it

on my skin i can feel

every ounce of love

pulsating

lost in space

Her skin was silky and it felt right to be pressed up against her while we watched the sky change. Black and blue into purple and green. Before it glowed naked under our gaze.

The infectious, silly giggle that gurgles

like rain spiraling through a gutter pipe.

The way your arms feel

when they wrap themselves around me.

Each night we cut a thread that tied us down to the earth, not to get away, never to get away, but instead to remember what it was like to believe. We were wild and then so very calm.

Above us, the sky hung so low we could almost touch it, but this time it wasn’t a dreamcatcher. It was a mirror, and we were the light caught inside poised to become a rainbow.

Celiainunderland — 11/07/2024 5:12 am

It was when you wrote ' she came with the light'

Thursday, 11 July 2024 5:12 am

I knew-knew then that I loved you...like 'that'

Thursday, 11 July 2024 5:13 am

There may have been other things but that was the oh...shit moment

Thursday, 11 July 2024 5:15 am

And you said you didn't know where it came from

river — 11/07/2024 5:17 am

It's true, I'm still not really sure

Celiainunderland — 11/07/2024 5:17 am

And I didn't either but I don't know. it made a whole lot of something come to the surface

river — 11/07/2024 5:18 am

For me the moment beyond the crush was when we wrote the poem together and I heard it.

That's when it turned from "I can handle friendship" to "oh shit I love her”

Hope hangs on love

That hangs on renewed purpose

Even in the dark

Stitching old wounds back together

This is how we offer ourselves

To the world

Together

We write this love letter

To what beauty is left.

Across an ocean. In the midst of our own oceanic battles

Glass souls. Once sharp and biting, Now

Weathered by waves

This is how we offer ourselves

To the world

Together

We write this love letter

To what beauty is left.

Vow. 12.12.24 10:53 am

Unconditionally, I will love you in the darkness and in the light. In the silence and in the sound, I will love you through the tears and the laughter and the moments in between. Celia

Vow 12.12.24 11:02 am

I promise to always listen with open ears and an open heart. I promise even on our hardest, darkest days to spend some time laughing or dancing. I love you, and I am lucky to love you, lucky to know you. River

Through ocean and time and love, this is the constellation we are charting together because somewhere among the clouds we refused to forget the sky.

Every message. And every poem and story yet to be written is another star pinned into the dark,

Our way of saying, we were here,

Through it all

And one day not far from now, we will look up

And know the night can spell our names.

The cartography continues _ we just switched mediums.

All the much.

Legend

1. purple — pain that remembered light
2. blue — words that became our shield
3. green — the return of belief
4. silver — the promise of our tomorrow