Find Out Where The Good Things Are

He gazed up at the sky, but there were no stars.

I told him not be silly, that nature breathed and nature lived regardless of our awareness of it; told him there were stars, he just couldn't see them with these clouds and inversion and the shimmering lights of a society not yet put to bed.

He was insistent, pulling me back down against him, a position from which I would never worry about the stars or lack thereof. In fact, the stars could shatter and crumble and land in blazing heaps across and around my body, but if it happened when my hip was touching his like that, I wouldn't notice.

I would never notice.

I would never notice the world melting with him, for with him the world's already melted.

I wondered what it would take to convince him about the stars, to convey that they were waiting, hidden, quiet, subdued, but existent. And waiting. I wondered how to narrate such a thought.

I didn't say anything, a symptom of contempt I develop in the dark, where my mind is too logical and fluent than my mouth wants to be, and I leave words to my eyes to convey. I speak at night with my face, for my mind can't manage to work my lips for that purpose.

It's a marvel how he sides with the idea of his heart, that conclusion that the stars are missing, vacant, gone. That undercurrent that he's looking for them, that he wants them dearly, but can't manage to believe they're beneath the clouds, they're present without the city, they thrive above the mountains. I want him to understand that a search of grandeur will be wasted, a quest of high proportions will be futile, for someday soon the clouds will fade, the city will sleep, and the stars will twinkle where they've always been.

Waiting, as they've always been, for a boy to open his eyes and look up.