When the Moon Hangs Low

There’s a game she likes to play by herself on some warm, summer nights when the moon hangs low and full, gleaming on the dark waters of a placid ocean. She likes to pretend the moon is her servant and can grant her wishes anytime. She likes to talk to it, and calls it her moon. But she never speaks her wishes out loud, nor does she ever speak to the moon in a loud voice. She only thinks of what she wants to say and pretends the moon can read her thoughts.

She speaks to it about all sort of things, whatever runs through her restless mind but her concluding wishes are always about him; a man of whom she dreams very often though she never speaks his name aloud either. She refers to him as “he”, as if the moon will always know there can’t be anyone else she’s talking or thinking about. As though the universe, with all its stars and planets, with its limitless size and unreachable beauty, all know there couldn’t be anyone but him.

And then, just before the first rays of dawn arrive to take her moon away, she whispers her final wish of the night, starting with “I, the girl with no name, ask you, my moon, to find him, my one and only star.”

She likes to be the girl with no name.

She likes to think that the world around her is empty and she, in the shadow of her night, can float and dance her way through the darkness to a place only she knows exists. She’s alone but never lonely, without a name so that no one speaks of or to her. She exists only through the things she does and leaves behind for others to find one day, perhaps when she’s long gone.

And she likes to believe that somewhere far, far away, there’s another world where people make wishes to the moon too. A world where people are actually happy and if life makes it so they need to wish for something, she can pirouette her way through the universe, gather stardust and make glowing origami for them that her dearest friend, the knowing moon, will tie on their door.

She imagines those people who look tiny from such a long distance yet their importance is so great, the thought of their finding the origami and having smiles on their faces gives her the brightest of smiles too.

And then she thinks that, for herself, she has only ever had one wish and how unfair it is that it never quite works to gather stardust for her own heart’s desires.

But then the air blows warm, and the girl with no name raises her gaze to the sky with the hope that someone, somewhere in a world far, far away, is gathering stardust to make an origami only for her, and so she smiles again.