Your Bedtime Story

In a forest of blackness a little girl wept. She did not cry tears or salt-water. She leaked pain, anguish, and dark-hearted thoughts. Looking at her you saw youth. You saw the trouble and disdain openly displayed.

The moon was full of hatred that night. You could see the anger, coupled with the passion of a thousand burning suns, light the fire that enveloped the face of that far-away man on the far-away moon. But you could sense it. You could see it.

Maybe the moon, the sphere of the night, was just letting go. Wanting to be rid of the madness that had haunted him for years, millenia, he just let all his worries descend to the earth-ridden child who just kept taking in the hatred, the sorrow, the unbearable pain. Or perhaps it was just coincidence. The girl and the moon experienced the pain of two different worlds, but, in one night, were connected.

Let me outline their shared troubles. Both were pale and tired. Both were sick of the loneliness. The girl wept in the forlorn forest, as the moon glared through the galaxy where nothing is close to anything. Both are bound still to sorrow. Both could not rid themselves of the shadow. Everyone knows the shadow. The girl was cloaked in the shadow. Even the moon recognized its despair. The shadow is all things horrid, deathly and unshaking. The shadow takes your breath, your smile, your heart. And worst of all, the shadow NEVER leaves, but entangles itself 'round everything that ever was and feeds and grows. That is why everyone knows of the shadow. Everyone, at some point, feels that shadow.

The girl, surrounded by the light -or rather the pain- of the moon, had not always been so lost, so hopeless. But neither had the moon.

There, prior to hatred, prior to sorrow, prior to shadow, had been a rose. A single rose. The rose had not been the shadow. One rose gave the universe hope. Let me bring you back, back to the time of the Rose...

The World was at peace. When I say World, I really mean the entire maxim of the universe. And when I say peace, think utopian splendor. For Sirius was dancing with Bellatrix in the heavens, a truly miraculous feat, even in ordinary times.