Galactic

“See, one day you’ll look at the stars and remember my face. Trust me”.

He turned over to Wildan, who kept her gaze upwards towards the galactic space above them. Her eyes shone with glee, a familiar one that she would feel whenever seeing the sky. Her lips curled sweetly, her face shining with the same gorgeous beauty he met from as old as he could remember. How long had they been there, sitting on the grassy plane outside their campus, facing the water of the causeway lake?

The stars continued to paint themselves over the infinite canvas, with strokes of soft pinks and purples and hues of dark blues illuminating their sky. The moon made a cameo appearance, peeking ever so slightly from the thin clouds of dusk. Wildan remained fixated on the shape of the sky; he remained stuck lovingly gazing over her.

“Dan, do you think one day we’ll ever reach there?”.

“The skies?”, she replied as she shifted towards him. He smiled warmly. If the skies could talk, he’d tell them to take Wildan soaring past the stratosphere, let her be where her heart is and his where hers was. Wildan was special; Wildan was the sky that followed him around for all the years he lived, truly lived. Wildan was the clusters of stars he would look up to in the early hours before day, the ones who shone down past his windowsill when he couldn’t sleep thinking about the future. Wildan was the galaxy to him how comets are to astronomers; she came only once in his life, but she was the one occupying his mind until she came again, brighter, prettier than before.

She didn’t answer immediately. She was thinking, carefully putting her swirls of thoughts into proper words, as how every universe made itself. To him, she made her own. She was her own universe, and he felt like an astronomer, astronaut even, flying into her galaxy and exploring every abstract and concrete vision of it.

“Maybe”.

It took a few seconds of considering before she went on, “if we are willed, I feel like the question we should really be asking is ‘what if one day we reach there?’. Think of it; do you think we’re even capable of controlling ourselves when we finally begin to taste the slivers of the universe’s wonders in front of us when we make it past Earth?”.