I breathe in the velvet smooth of the dark until it consumes me, fills me up in endless shades of cool.

The frigid air twists around my skin, slipping its icy fingers between mine, sliding up the gap between my jacket and my flesh, nestling in the small of my back where you used to sleep.

I breathe in the faded moon bathed in blood and stripped of light as the earth drifts between it and the sun. It fills the hollow places in me left by the velvet darkness of the sky.

The stars dance like I do, bursting up from my back in the snow to holler and skip across fresh powder. Noise bursts out of my chest, the first truly happy bellow in far too long. I run like the child I had been beneath the once moody sky.

I breathe in the warm glow of the lights spilling from my windows and out across the snow, fresh and merry and dancing like firelight in this new, glistening world.

It’s been too long since I’ve felt her pull, since I’ve danced beneath a sky full of stars, alone in the moments between days, between the rising and setting of the sun, between fantasy and reality.

I fell in love with it long ago, those in between moments where nothing but my own, misted breath drifted with me in the darkness, where sunken footsteps carried me far from home.

I’ve never been one to stay, but I fell in love long ago watching stars race across an endless night sky.

And so I find myself here again.