The Eternal Dance of Stars and Darkness

What do they do when it's all too much - these little people under such a big sky? When they feel too much? How do they breathe in the too small rooms of houses when it feels like the walls are caving in and their lungs won’t work and everything is too fast and too slow all at once? When they forget what the stars look like?

These little people with hearts all synchronous, thrumming like a message in their chest. Hearts built, back before steel and concrete and rigid rules. Hearts that pump an old stolen fire, that calls itself passion, through their little bodies. Little because their souls feel so big and their skin aches with want, the want to fade away like a ghost so everything it holds in can be free. What do they call that? Do they have words for it? Do they have words? Maybe they don’t need them, their hearts all in time, all sharing one mind as they beg with nothing but sound for a storm, for a wild thing. They are all wild things, each with a different but similar scream in their brains and fingers that drum along their thighs as the air crackles with the words;

“Go. Be something. Be Anything. Be anyone.”

Do they scream at the sky, scream for a peace they don’t know if they want, each ragged roar echoed by its neighbour til it's less scream more prayer? Do they pray? Do they look at the paintings on cave walls and long for the certainty it showed, when people could steal fires from gods and the universe would speak its secrets and wants without hesitation, make its promises and commit?

“You shall live forever.”

Some days they are happy, they gather around a raging fire and its heat matches the heat of their blood and the stars look so bright and the air thrums with anticipation. They hold hands and they promise to protect each other. They laugh. They cry. They feel as they were meant to feel. They dance, ceremonial and rhythmic, faster and faster til joy gives way to ecstasy, to bacchanalian frenzy - they howl at the moon like wild dogs and steal the life of each creature that comes past and consume it like an elixir. Perhaps they would call it ambrosia, they would call it manna - but this too is something they have no words for. They dance until their muscles ache and their bones hurt and their feet bleed, til drums have ripped calluses into the drummer's hands. They dance like if they didn’t they’d die. They dance until dusk turns to dawn and then back to dusk. They do not say but they know that there is only so long the light will keep. 

When they stop it is sudden. Each dancer like a puppet with strings cut. They fall to the floor breathing sand. It is dark now. They slink and stagger back to their houses, which no longer feel like homes, and the air is quiet now, heavy. They sleep. They sleep until vines grow from their floor boards.Their minds are slow in hibernation - slow and separate. Their hearts ache with the silence, each one too dull, too quiet to be heard by anyone else. They are alone. They feel nothing. Each chest hollowed by the weight of their loneliness as they wait for the dark to pass. How do they live when the thick dry air makes it hurt to breathe? How do they move when the tangle of vines that have grown around them keep their limbs bound? What do they do when they feel nothing but the ache of having once had something that’s now turned to ash in their hands? How do they remember what the stars look like when they can't rise from their beds, stilled by the reaching hand of decay and the tired of the dark and hibernation? How do they remember the lives they once had without being able to trace the old paintings that promised so much more than this? Is there more than this?

They are eaten whole; the dark seeping in through the cracks in the windows and doors, dousing their rooms in smog and ash. They want it to be gone. This want is all they know to feel now, a want for the dark to go. The memory of the dances are hazy now - the darkness has seeped into their pores and filled their brains with its cold heavy mist. Time has stopped, the fragile mechanisms of the clocks clogged by smoke produced by no flame - it is an endless dark, they fear. It will stay, they think. It will stay and it will settle and they will remain in their beds unmoving until the houses crumble and the hungry overgrowth consumes the ruins and they rot into nothing. 

Then it goes. Swept away by the ocean breeze. They begin to remember - ever so slightly - what it means to be people. They begin to move, shaking free of the creeping shrubbery. They rebuild. They mourn those who went with the dark but they celebrate those who didn't. They are still - a stillness free of crushing weight; peace. They wait to see the stars again.