A Love Letter from a Stray Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

was open to his gaze and my heart open. In one nightmare, I shouted to him for help and all that real day my real throat was hoarse from the shout, my real mind reeling with need for him, for even the moon can be frightened by stalking starshadows which flicker in her nightmares.
    I have gazed at his face for thousands of years, his windward, fireward, forward, pathward face, a mountain face I have explored and watched, and behind the snowy boulders I have seen the deepest and softest and rarest thing—the blue eyes of a snow leopard gazing back.
    For him, all the world became eager. The pip would willingly sprout, the fish would dance which had only swum before, the rain would jump which had only fallen before. Tender to all aspiration, he lent the saplings a hand. His mindlight flooded the world like a director with whom every actor is in love and women couldn’t help but respond which I understand because the world couldn’t help but respond: the tiniest spider ran arpeggios for him, the Nile burst its banks, the Amazon forest went on the razzle for him, the bee sucked harder for nectar when he cherished its diligence. Midnight never knew herself till him, but then she dressed in deep-blue velvet and shared a tequila or three, all for his sweet charisma, his charm, for he was the quickener of what was inheld. He saw meaning in all things and so made the world matter in mindedness. Before him, any old dawn would do. He appeared and sunrise increased the voltage because of the unique warmth of his gaze and the dawn chorus turned up the volume because of the quality of his listening. The rainbow began life with just two colours, red and violet, but seeing the wash of pleasure in his eyes it flung in five more, and then the countless shades between. The mountain robin never knew quite who it sang for till he watched as it fluffed up its breast feathers for the best-ever robin boast and he, of course, spoke fluent robin, so he understood it perfectly, and as his face was creased with kindness, lined with story, and crumpled with love, I wanted to make my nest with him, I wanted my belly plump with a swelling egg. I never understood why he was so reluctant.
    I was there at his beginning. If I did not exist, the life of mankind would have been only mundane, lovely but ordinary. He could build his hut, collect his water and pick his fruit, a creature of the day only, and happily so but a little lacklustre. I never took away his dayness but I flooded him with an insight of shadows, a feral lustre, that light not of the mind’s eye but of the mind’s loins. Wild licence. I can affect the lives of mussels and the pull of tides, but no mind knew I did that until him. Wonder riddles our love. No wonder I loved him: his wondering mind was the first mind on earth to know the iridescence of my wonderlight.
    Metaphor began because he loved me—and I am the first metaphor. He was charged with it, swollen with it, metaphor forced its way out of him, a spurt of seed, each glittering and dancing, minute and yet magnificent, the pip invisible and invincible, microcosmic yet containing new worlds a thousand times over, each seed a seed-syllable of speech, lighting the air with a cascade of starlight which fizzes on my tongue. All is metaphor—I am the moon, but I am not the moon. He is Diego, but much more truly he is all of mankind. I am one woman, but I am every woman who understands loss. I am Frida and I am not Frida. We are both fractals, shapes which can be divided into countless self-similar shapes, because all human hearts are fractal like this. True and yet just a metaphor in a world of metaphors. Metaphor is itself a metaphor, a carrying-across as a child would carry a star in his cupped hands across a room to show his father. ‘Look, Papa, look how I made a star and when can we go to the moon?’
    He was a child of starlight, child of no one: I was the mother of no one so I elect my children. There