lathriel | Snippet

Because I'm really proud of it, I thought I'd share a bit of the short story with you all :)

I was an artisan, a craftsman, with an inheritance from a late, estranged uncle that allowed me to travel and gain inspiration for my next great work—or, really, my first. For five years I had been traveling the world; wandering the streets and jungles of foreign lands; sailing the frothy waters of the sea. My mind was full of images, of places and people, of tastes and smells, and customs I could barely understand. My heart, though… my heart… it was only ever full of one thing: yearning.

I had not realized it until recently. Always there had been a listlessness to my ways, a lust for movement—forward, away, back. Never could I seem to find happiness in one place, be it old or new, familiar or strange. I had disguised my yearning with boredom, and disgust, and apathy. I had done all that I could to prevent it from whispering to my heart, for in the moment that I heard its true name I would be a slave to it’s call. Sitting in judgment one can still feel satisfied; once one realizes the depth of emptiness in his own heart, there is nothing to be done but to attempt to fill it—until the end of your days.

It had come upon me on a train one night, chugging along through the mountains in some distant land whose name was lost among all the others. Lying awake in my car, staring out the window as the trees and rocks rushed past, I saw how the stars remained fixed in the sky, flickering with sunlight from light years away. We seemed to circle the stars, barely curving around them as we barely curved around the globe.

How long had those stars shone? How long had we gazed upon them, wondering what they were—where they were? Was there someone out there at that very moment looking at those very stars, wondering these very questions? And if there was, how in the world would I ever find her? And did I need to?

The colossal size of the universe laid itself bare upon my consciousness as I pressed the back of my head more deeply into my pillow, as if I might be able to take it all in if I could just step back far enough. But it was impossible—to comprehend the stars was a feat no man could dare hope to achieve. And yet, somehow, I felt that if I could find that other mind out there, the other soul, under the same stars, riding that very train of thought, that it might relieve me of the magnitude, the weight, of the responsibility I’d suddenly burdened myself with. For if I could not grasp the vastness of infinity, I did not want to leave it up to others to do so for me.

And somehow, while the weight of it sat upon my chest, I felt my heart expand. I breathed deeply, and became keenly aware of an icy, nauseating emptiness inside my chest. There were stars in there. It was the same vast emptiness of the sky, peppered with fairy lights, and dust motes floating on moonbeams—shadows flitting through the pitch of a bottomless, endless, borderless emptiness. If there was a soul out there that night, watching the same stars as I, then that would be the soul who could understand the very galaxy within my own breast, and I within hers.