ON LUNAE'S TWENTIETH REVOLUTION AROUND THE SUN // MESHARI

Lunae has this distrust for local weather forecast reports because of her belief that the day’s weather is determined by the people she comes across in the street and their faces rather than a chance of precipitation or wind speed. I remember her once telling me she learned braille by running her fingers, and tongue occasionally, through old lovers’ thighs in poorly lit rooms embellished with a perpetual haze of nicotine. Now, she walks around with braille dots covering her fingertips as a memento mori. A reminder of that mortality devouring her and adding gasoline to her flame of passion tucked comfortably (some days not do comfortably) in her fingertips. That mortality reminding her to kiss, touch, and love. To be before she’s not. She developed this habit of carrying pocketfuls of flowers for loud days to hold against her ears and listen to a daisy or marigold’s childhood stories. On her death bed, her mother whispered in her ears, “don’t stop picking clouds and tasting them”. Now, between classes, you can usually find her on top her favourite tree on campus with a spoonful of cumulonimbus. To her surprise, she doesn’t mind the grey ones too. Her friends in the architecture department borrow the ends of her smiles to model bridge arches after. Granted, I don’t think any of them passed the assignment but the arches were very pretty, indeed. She dug out the Ark of the Covenant from God’s hands to expose, and bathe in, man’s flaws. That day, that blasphemous day, she danced on moons, stars and crosses. She spent a whole week bouncing between God’s various houses with a battalion of lost zen meditators only to prove to people the kind of God that came and kissed her forehead when she slept next to her mother’s empty bed does exist. Lunae wanders around train stations at night lighting cigarettes with ephemeral platonic conversationalists (travellers, some would call them) sitting between the rail tracks rail tracks rail tracks. Old man St. Paul forgot to include her in his Christmas card mail list but thats okay, she still makes sure to send him little birds’ ribcages and feathers in an envelope to keep his mind off that dreaded upside-down cross (a very uncomfortable one, she told me once). Disappearing into her uncle’s mountains, she followed the steps of Zarathustra, an old friend of her great grandfather, leaving behind the trail of cigarette buds and unwritten poetry. Her previous lover was a man she met on the train looking outside the window with a childlike penchant for discovery. He was talking to himself and jittering random numbers in a small notebook while drinking a cheap cup of coffee. She bough a cheap cup of coffee for herself and help his free, sweaty, hand; jittering as well, for the entirety of the trip. She kissed his knuckles when the train stopped and that was that. Lunae revolves around the run the same way a hummingbird flutters in a child’s belly the minute they are born; erratic, uncomfortable, but at the same time, she revolves around the sun with an infinity of dreams juxtaposing the reality fuelling her passion and love for the insignificant. Just like the jittery love, Lunae’s childlike penchant for discovery was only a speckle in the nebulae of childlike penchants lining alongside her spine.