Warm - Greg

Prompt: Warm Under the Stars 12/9/06


The air was warm, the ground was warm, and even the blades of grass, normally cool to the touch, were warm. He looked over to his honey sleeping next to him under the desert sky, her chest rising and falling with each warm breath. Everything was as warm as his body and the world seemed to extend continuously from the center of his heart, as if he could not tell where his skin ended and everything else–-the ground, the grass, the deserts sounds, the cacti silhouettes began.

He wasn’t naked, but he wished he were. He wanted all of this, the desert, the air, all of creation to touch him without even the thinnest barrier of fabric. He wanted to be wrapped and held by the universe; wondered if this was what they meant by God enfolding you in the palm of his hand.

The stars seemed so bright and beautiful that his eyes hurt. Not from the brightness, but from the utter beauty and miracle of it all. His eyes welled with tears, and he thought of poets who say that one day the stars will fall from the sky, and scientists, explaining further, that entropy will cause them to fade and snuff out to nothing like spent candles. Maybe so, he thought, maybe someday, but not for a long long time.

He stared at a single star. Maybe it was a galaxy–one of a billion stars. He tried to connect to it. Connect to the consciousness, to a being, to a person on that star laying in that desert staring at my star looking at him. “Hello!” he thought smiling. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

His honey stirred and he looked at her delicate face in the starlight. Then he turned back toward his star, then he heard, not a sound, but a felt sense. A voice, a presence, a woman: “Hello,” she said, “I hear you.”