The Rotation of the Moon

You sit alone in your room, bundled in covers, sipping water in the dark, and you decide to light a candle. You think about a boy, who is probably thinking about other boys, and you wonder about first kisses and last kisses and everything that happens in between. A half-smile plays on your lips with the remembering, and wishful thinking blurs the edges of a faded memory – washes over it like water and lets it bleed into the soft-lit, quiet present. You are gripped by the sudden fear that you are always moving in circles, and when you go to sleep you dream about the rotation of the moon.

An image is conjured in the dark.

Your thoughts drift to a time of day when black silhouettes press up against a deep blue sky – a lonely hour when the deep, deep night spills into early morning and the light of a brand new dawn barely breaks over some distant horizon. Everything is washed in hues of black and blue and you close your eyes and take a deep breath in. You hear the hushed crashes of a steady tide, and you picture yourself burying your toes in the sand at the edge of the sea, your arms wrapped around yourself in a lonely embrace against the chill of a soft breeze.

You dip your feet into the water and feel the rhythm of the waves while the whole world sleeps around you. The endlessness of the sea merging into the sky makes you feel small, and you lean your head back and revel in the feeling that you might as well be a tiny grain of sand on a quiet beach stretching into an aching infinity. The stillness of the moment calms you, but the quiet of it breaks your heart, and you look up at the fading moon and wonder how something so far away can tug at the very water lapping at your naked feet.

You think of a soft light that can be seen through a closed window, in a room somewhere high up where you sleep next to a boy who dreams of other boys, while you dream about the rotation of the moon tugging at a sea spilling into the sky.