Out on the courtyard hill, with your back to the great concrete cube of the university, the half moon hangs low over your head. Half moons depress you. They make you think of sliced things. A missing half. Implicitly, a ruined whole. Still, you appreciate the blue tint this moon pours upon the grass you dig your fingers into. Besides, your friend likes the moon, so you will try to be patient.
IT IS SO BEAUTIFUL TONIGHT
ISN'T IT
Yes, you say. To a passerby, you are aware you resemble a man talking to his own bared left arm. His dominant arm, as it happens--you are holding a pencil, mapping the stars. The isolation of the university has its advantages: the quiet, and the lack of light pollution. Still, you are not a man talking to his dominant left arm. You are a man talking to a constellation. The constellation just so happens to have appeared on your skin, rather than in any sky.
You have called this constellation Crimsona Major, for this is what he likes to be called. He has a head and four limbs all appearing to droop slightly. Suspended in a pained sort of dance, like a lethargic Pinocchio. At first this disturbed you, and at times it still does, but Crimsona reminds you it is okay--the pose is symbolic. He is in no real pain, not anymore, because he is no longer alone. And what truer pain exists than loneliness? He smiles at you as he asks this. He does not smile in a traditional sense, but you feel it. You feel his nine speckles glow against you. You feel a gentle warmth, like the trickling of a sunbaked stream, hum through your very bones. He is trying to learn how to hug you, you've been told. You are hoping he will succeed soon.
You cannot remember the last time someone hugged you.
This is a sentimental spot. It is behind the observation tower where the two of you first met. It was thirteen months ago, a bitter evening in the eye of your on-campus Winter holidays. An especially fogged and empty time in your life. You remember your dorm, deserted--everyone else gone home or out at a party you were not invited to. Six days spent between sleep and a textbook and you decided you had to get out, you had to, or you'd simply lose your mind. Glancing through your blinds, you saw the sky was a crisp, velvet black, swirled thick with stars, like creamer in a hot drink. Those stars--tiny pinpricks, a hundred eyes--whispered to your very soul, and as usual you were gripped by a desire to get closer to them. Constellations do not judge, nor do they reject. They feel only the finest emotions. They are flawless.
You remember leaving your claustrophobic, trash-bitten room of stale air and bare shelves. Wishing you were leaving it forever. In worn slippers and a zip-up hoodie limp over your pyjamas, you zombied through the residential wing. You felt as if you were stepping (with great effort) through a long, bland, and yet peaceful dream. You crossed the interior bridge--saw again those brilliant stars--and were swallowed into the academic wing. Every classroom, lecture hall, lab and study space...the modern library, the cafeteria with its lights venomously gold as a wasp...all of it seemed surreal, oddly alien in their bleached midnight shades. Motion-detected lights flicked on one by one in your wake, a few seconds too late, as if to follow you. Then one sharp right turn and you were climbing a dusted spiral staircase--one of the few archaic architectural remnants of the frequently renovated university. Hard, dangerous, beautiful stone steps. You hoped for anything. Prayed madly yet wholeheartedly (as you often did) for some perfect person to step out of the shadows and cling to you and never let go.
The observation room, as ancient as its staircase, was deserted; a glacial breeze blushed through the panoramic window someone had left cracked just marginally open. You shivered. It was a circular room, lit enough by the moon which blinked through its wide oval skylight. It reminded you of a mausoleum, and indeed held a sombre, faintly haunted atmosphere. Perhaps this was just you--for, to you, the observation room was a place of worship. It formed the highest tower of the university, Gothic and bearing a lunar clock. It extended from the otherwise fairly level building like a blaspheming finger, scraping feebly at Heaven.
It was here that you approached the central telescope, pointing it up into the skylight. You adjusted and re-adjusted...you felt you were gazing into a sniperscope. Your target, then, found you rather quickly. Nine stars, strangely isolated. Strangely dim. Unrecognisable--was anybody else seeing this? As you looked at those stars, all breath fled from your body. You had discovered something. You raced for a sheet of paper, frantically scribbled down the design (what could you name it? It had no clear shape...perhaps a serpent or a maiden or--), and you rushed to wake your advisor. He was always fond of you. In his nightgown, visibly exasperated yet endlessly patient, the old man bent down and peered into the telescope. He looked for minutes. Then he moved back, rubbing his temples. He told you, with a look of deep pity, that there was nothing there.
Every time you checked in the following thirteen months, the constellation remained. You had eyesight checkups, borrowed endless irritated classmates and advisors, even visited the hospital suite for brain damage. But you were fine. It was others who could not see the constellation, even as you saw it once a week, glowing more and more every time. Occasionally you would whisper to it. Tell it about your day. It served as a celestial diary, of sorts. You saw no harm. It was a cathartic feeling, to release all those pent-up hopes and nightmares into a square of the sky. You finally understood those who prayed to God.
Of course you did worry about your mental state at times. You had experienced all pedestrian manners of feverish hallucination: sickness, sleep paralysis, anaesthesia, experimental use of drugs...but, even as those hallucinations had occasionally felt real, none had recurred so persistently. None had been so solid and palpable. None had set your chest aflame when you gazed upon them. It was shortly after you decided to write your final thesis on this constellation that it appeared on your skin. Faintly, at first. As faintly as it had appeared that initial evening in the sky. So gradually it became clearer, redder, and finally verbal.
IT WAS DIFFICULT SO DIFFICULT SO
You lay a gentle hand over him. You know.
Physically, Crimsona resembles a man your age, almost familiar, though he can do things human men cannot. He can live in sky and skin. He was banished into space as a constellation for a long time, cursed to never be seen. He doesn't like to talk about this time, or why he was put there, but he aches--and you ache--when the subject is brought up. Best to leave it be. He was so lonely, so numb. But then...then you found him. From the day you laid eyes upon him through your telescope just over a year ago
OUR ANNIVERSARY
you freed him. He gathered all his power and, through your unique psychic connection, managed very gradually to manifest on your skin. Only recently has he gained such strength to speak to you. You first heard his voice when you woke up after a frightening dream. His first words to you were Good Morning.
Crimsona Major is the most beautiful man you have ever seen.
Here, mapping the stars which--while special in their own right--seem inferior to him, you feel a strange serenity wash over you. For the first time in your life, you feel maybe everything is going to be okay.