My love was a curious creatures in her ways. Always left the lights on, the candles in her heart (hearth, hearth). Always sleeping with the strangest of smiles.

To break into the daylight when the world shone like glitter was to shatter the illusion that was her, to surround it in yellow and abandon it there, leaving it, glowing like Spring in a world of autumn. Blackened silhouettes in reminiscence of another time. Beauty, virtue, love. Hearths full of it, glowing or blossoming, unheated yet still existing.

My love fell into the sky.

---

He murmurs, he murmurs, the words are as strange as a the painted reflections on stained glass, the ones that speak of another time, and he murmurs, rest assured, of a time just as spun of white, of words flowing in endless circuits. The fluid motions of them, over and under, like waves. Notes of speech and decibels of muted revelation. And an unmasking within.

“Where is she?” They command. Their daughter has been missing for several months. The constable, his eyes cold, has a bat in his hand, a wooden weapon that knew too many faces, too many bloodshot eyes filled with innocence, and it crackles with every turn of his wrist. It crackles like a star; like a smile being unfolded, as the room is filled with jagged shadows, as jagged as hurricane clouds tearing themselves from a moonlit sky --

Slanderously different from the words that are unchanging; they are asking the only survivor.

---

“Rivers full of them….” She laughed. I remember that night. “Hundreds of miles of water, all flowing out to the sea.”

Stars were beaming back at her from beneath the bridge, peeking shyly between the cracks, caught in the lure of that majestic face. All was aglow with the curling lap of waves, each aglow, shining like a galaxy had melted in the palm of the earth, and I, no more indelible, pooled in the hazel hillocks of innocent eyes.

Her breath carried too many stories for the ocean to hold. “I have never seen the ocean at night.”

But she imagined it, I know she did, describing it always with invisible words, letting them push past coldness and into recollection. We were surrounded in dark blue and silver, wrapped in a summertime chill of fragrance, of suffocated reds and romance, until they turned themselves into an azure wash, glowing and falling and flying and existing. “I suppose it would be like falling down.”

Her hands were curled around the railing of the bridge.

I understood the glamour of pallor.

---

He smiled as they sipped water during the interrogation, knuckles white with rage, unable to part his lips into the truth – and that was what he had always told, over and over again, immutable, unshakable, stoic and brave, lovelorn over a love lost, and not.

They let him go after another day passed.

The past is a strange echo, a shout from another time. They were designed to leave together, drowning in the same chasm, spread across the faraway world of glittering sky, basking in the calm, reveling in the cold. They had stepped on the railing together, eyes full of strange longing, hands locked, intentions set. Ready to touch a hidden descent.

Together, together, together… Ready to take a beautiful fall, and only one life glistened like a constellation.

---

With a hopeful gaze, it glittered there, settled on the horizon, a sprawl of dark blue, but the stars bloomed in the salt water like forget-me-nots, swirling together, rolling and tumbling with tides; tides like wind, tides like unforgettable breezes, the sky a perfect mirror of the ocean.

“They will forget us,” she smiled, wistful at the thought, dipping in and out of another world.

“And we, them,” I found myself repeating.

A step closer to the field of blue, the bridge clunking beneath her feet. Toes that had skittered across the echoing water, stars sparkling in the liquid, flowing over her skin.

I remember it now. Remember it so clearly. I will always remember it, fading with a sudden ease, a splash of white and then nothingness, white specks twisting and writhing around a pale epicenter, droplets flying like stars exploding. An echo of applause into the silent cold night, one million stars clapping their hands together, the sound of one thousand embraces all flowing out to sea, one million whispers drifting, a single wing turning.

I fell into the water, but my love fell into the sky.