But there were no shooting stars - and even the moon was obscured by stormy clouds. Lightning flashed, thunder rumbled
She was still wishing for a shooting star, but beheld in silent awe the wild dance of bright blue light and the rumbling thunder which echoed so in the distance. What beautiful weather this was, even though she still wanted her shooting star.
Wanted it, wanted it with an unbearable yearning. Wanted to make her wish, and see it fulfilled. Wanted to believe it could be fulfilled. Wanted to trace the path of the star with her index finger and whisper her wish into the night sky and hear it repeat in her mind and let the power of her imagination take over and make things right.
Dazed by the display and distracted on the whole, she accidentally dragged her pen across her leg. The nib was sharp - 0.38 to be exact, and it tore into the surface of her skin. A shallow cut. Stinging and swelling up, a little. She was so distracted she didn't even notice it, until she changed her position and felt the slight smarting pain.
At least it wasn't a 0.28 nib, she thought. That might have been worse.
The cut was stinging a little more than she expected. But at least now she could keep her mind on something else.
***
Her mind was slowly beginning to clear from the haze of after-nap grogginess. Minutes passed on and on, blobs of time that dripped by steadily like sauce. She was feeling awake, and as time passed on, it seems as though her very thoughts were sorting and arranging themselves out, folding themselves up neatly away to be stored away, or forming together in coherency so that she could come to a conclusion before filing it away. Just thinking, concluding what to do, and thinking about her decision was comforting, and easier to face and handle compared to the tremulous aching of that wretched heart.
Had she been piling ice around her heart, building up walls and enforcing it with shields for the past few hours? She didn't know, but at the very least the feeling had dulled, and that was all that mattered for now, to live. She felt rational, which was a joke, but she had to be steady.
When needed she could actually be cold, but it was so long that she had felt the need to be cold, that the once-familiar tools had become rusty. She turned the tools around and around, looking at the reddish-brown rust that so heavily speckled the surface, and wondered what she should do, how to sandpaper it exactly. For so long she had allowed fire to burn in her heart, that even though it had only burned in spurts, her old tools had suffered.
Then she realised that perhaps that was not really the case, that it was more so that enmity had not appeared in her life for a long long while. The teacher made her tear down the old walls, and there was never any need to really build them up again. Her shield lay there, forgotten and dusty with cobwebs. She lifted it up but the weight was unfamiliar to her and she was unable to move with it as one.
What had she become? Contact had not been kept, and she didn't regret that. In fact she was still rather strongly attached to the cause of avoiding contact with the people of her foreign past, though if faced with it, she would be more neutral - could she just have your name first, it has slipped her memory - than strongly opposed.
But never mind. She could think about that another time, as she slowly fingered her tools and placed the last thought back in its place.
***
Her ears buzzed a little, as though she had stuffed ear plugs into it or just submerged her head under water.
She looked at the cut on her leg, and then out of the window. The sound of rain greeted those stuffed ears.
It had started to rain. Beautifully.
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