Moonie!

Somewhere across the stretch of the blue skies, the light we know begins to lose its edge. Far beyond the occasional murmurs of solar flares protesting the gathering darkness, two bodies hurtle through the black, each caught in the other’s pull.

One comes burning through the dark, its surface restless with fire, flaring and breaking at the edges. Sparks trail behind it like a brushstroke dragged across some immeasurable canvas. Keeping pace beside it is something colder, a frigid body of rock glazed in ice, pale and still, like a shard chipped from a frozen world.

Fire and frost travelling through the black, an unlikely alliance held together by something unseen, perhaps beyond understanding.

Their paths tighten and widen in a rhythm of their own, each close sweep seeming to press them apart, each long retreat drawing them back.

At the closest sweep, the frozen body begins to yield to the heat. Frost lifts from its surface in thin white veils. Ice retreats into dark seams of rock. Along its edges, whole fragments soften into vapour and disappear into the black. A little closer and there might be nothing left to return.

The fiery body bears the approach differently. Its wild, fiery eruptions shorten. Great tongues of flame that had been breaking loose from its surface curl back toward the core. The violence gathers inward, held there for one strange, suspended moment.

Far below, on a blue rock turning quietly through the dark, someone looks up at the moon.

And hopes, somewhere beneath another sky, someone else has thought to look up too.

There is no knowing. Only the silver truce hanging between their separate nights, offering neither message nor answer. Still, for a while, it is something they can both have without having to reach for one another.

Then daylight comes and takes the moon with it.

Their lives take them back too.

Days gather into months. Months disappear into years. Between one moon and the next, there is no knowing what the other has seen, what they have carried, or who they have slowly become.

The moon changes with the passing nights. A little less. A little more. Gone for a while, then quietly returned. And somewhere beneath it, perhaps, they do the same.

Many moons have passed since there was a night when both looked up from beneath the same patch of sky. Whatever existed there belongs to another time now. Perhaps that nearness was simply as close as two lives such as theirs could safely come.

After all, somewhere far above them, two bodies know something of such distances.

They too draw close enough to alter one another, then follow the curve away before closeness asks too much. They too disappear into the black, only to find the same pull waiting somewhere along the arc.

And who is to say they did not, once, share a moon of their own?