Because You Love A Shooting Star

 

A shooting star streaks the velvet night. Its stationary brethren weep for another fallen one.

 

Don’t lie there, helpless in my arms. Why must you lay so still in my embrace, afraid to breathe lest it destroy this fantasy we’re setting up? Why do your eyes focus on some far away star in the window, when I still feel them upon me? You watch me by watching the stars. Because you know I am that shooting star that has passed by our window for barely a second. I am your shooting star; I’m passing you by as we lie here.

 

Why won’t you fight it? Why won’t you rile against the injustice that I am putting you though? Why don’t you rage at my callousness, for loving you knowing full well that I will just leave you? Why won’t you try to hurt me?

 

Why won’t you take a chance and kill me whilst I sleep with you in my arms? At least that way, you will have me.

 

Because that is the only way you can capture a falling star. To kill it. To tear it from the sky and tie it to the ground. Never to fly again.

 

Why are you lying there? Helpless and sighing? Don’t you know that I will leave you in the morning?

 

That I HAVE to leave you in the morning?

 

Did you believe your love would hold me? That your love will keep me here, holding you while the moonless starlit night churns in the silence outside and the darkness whispers inside?

 

How can love hold me when it is the one thing I am running away from?

 

I am love’s tragedy.

 

Keep on lovin’ and leavin’. Because I don’t want to be loved and left…again. Might as well do the leaving myself.

 

But you said it yourself; you keep on wondering why you keep on falling for the playboy type. I wonder why as well.

 

You shift and I look down to find your eyes glittering back at me in the darkness.

 

I smile and point to where the shooting star was. “Saw that?”

 

You look back towards the window. “Yeah.”

 

“Didn’t expect one tonight.” I say softly. You shift and I bury my face in your hair. “I’ve got to keep on checking the almanac for things like this. And then maybe when the next one comes…”

 

“You’re going to leave.” Matter-of-fact. A sad smile creases my face. God, your pride is as worse as mine.

 

“Well…yeah. So?” My trademark phrase.

 

Your silence made me hope you were just looking out at the stars. I embrace you tighter.

 

“Stay outside tomorrow night” I say after a while. “There’s going to be a meteor shower and I want you to see.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I am a shooting star”

 

I return to watching the stars outside the window and pretend that I didn’t feel the teardrop fall unto my arm.