Rochester

The stars hang suspended in the universe and she’s beginning to wonder if maybe she does, too.

She’s drowning. Not in blood or water, but in moonlight. She’s bathing in it like it’s milk. Everything is painted pale, and it takes several seconds for her to realise that it isn’t the world that’s turned upside down—it’s her car. She’s lying beneath a blanket of snow and shattered glass. Resting in her puddle of moonlight. Catching cold white flakes in her eyes like the bottom of a snowglobe. It hurts to breathe. Why does it hurt to breathe?

Might have something to do with the bit of windshield in her side.

With the fuzzy, languid thoughts of a fading mind—a dying mind—she considers how pretty the snow looks. How she had never quite appreciated it before. How, were she able, she might urge her arms to meet above her head and her legs to come together, and then to spread out again, to make an angel. She thinks of fairy lights. Christmas Eve. Fire pits and winter weddings. Obnoxious supermarket carols. Her mother’s home cooking. She thinks of a love like something out of a sappy Hallmark film, and she suddenly wants it more than anything in the world. She wants it so badly it’s like broken glass inside her heart. She wants to pack the snow against the palms of her gloves and make something beautiful. Something different.

Her eyelids feel heavy. She watches drowsily as each breath plumes from her lips like clouds against the moon-stained air, and, tentatively, she opens her mouth to catch a snowflake on her tongue. To taste something other than flesh and iron. She doesn’t notice when her eyes close.

They say stars die before they’re ever truly witnessed by those on earth.

She’s beginning to wonder if maybe she did, too.