A New Moon

The corners were too perfect. They had been too perfect since the the day he arrived, stoically supporting that strong spotless glass with infallible dedication, sheltering him at every moment with those impeccable ninety degrees, warmly receiving visits at regular intervals from a devoted pair of gloved hands that destroyed any dust which might have sought refuge in their rigid right angles.

He despised the corners during the day, when they joined forces with the window to ward off the most vivid and passionate components of the sun’s generous light. And he despised the corners even more at night, when they numbed the haunt of the darkness and filtered the glow of the moon and blurred the sight of the stars.

The corners were too perfect, just like the well-organized and clearly-labeled cabinets lining the wall across from him. Just like the glossy sink standing guard at the entrance. Just like the stringent tubes and the color-coded pills and the dutiful blood pressure cuff; just like the proud IV trolley with all its bags and buttons, the eclectic wall with all its outlets and switches. Just like the humble sheets with all their wrinkling and all their watching and all their unwavering commitment to their one purpose of keeping him company--of enveloping him from the world--of holding him, sliding their folds above and beneath and between his limbs, of refusing to leave when the medication made him vomit, when it struck him with flowing waves of sweat, when it moved him to moan throughout the night, when it shrank him to a feeble outline within their all-encompassing presence.

He never really slept anymore. He either spent his time in a dreamless, vacant, drugged unconscious nonexistence, or staring out of that window trying to remember the feel of sun or wind or rain, each of them journeying to him all the way from the boundless sky, perching upon him, seeping into his skin, dancing through his nerves and requesting innocent entry to his flawed human heart. Time passed--days and nights, though he was often too weak to count them--and the nurses began to slip through the door with greater frequency. The doctors talked less and whispered more. His children, when they visited, sat at the edge of the bed with a new glaze in their eyes and a fresh urgency. They spoke of their mother with a new calmness; they held his hand with a new softness.

He knew, even before they told him. The word didn’t land the blow he thought it would--hospice. It was more like a blessing than a curse; he felt not convicted but exonerated. He spent that night, again, with his head turned on the pillow so he might look through that window and love the sky from afar. The stars were so far away--and so obscured by pieces of the hospital, by the lights of cars passing below, by the thickness of that pristine glass and its well-meaning corners--that they didn’t even look white. They looked yellow and smeared, and some were even missing, having fled or hid or simply excused themselves from the insult of the industry below. He had, of course, never been able to touch the stars--but he had, long ago, been able to love them without obstruction.

The social worker didn’t immediately understand when he brought up the idea the next day. The doctors were thoroughly confused, the nurses a little more patient. The hospice coordinator was sincerely respectful of his wishes, and his children--a scarring sadness spilled across their faces--understood through an incomprehensible grief. He did not falter in his decision, so before long someone obtained the forms. His frail hand shook as he marked paper with ink for the last time.

He was grateful for the sound and expedited acceptance of his wishes, for he had made note of the waning crescent last night. It meant that the moon would be retiring tonight, stepping away from its reign for a brief time before waxing back to full life. They would be brightest in the absence of the moon, and he did not want to sacrifice such wonder for the sake of more plodding days that only led to the revelation that he had nothing more to accomplish here--there was not a detail, not even a goodbye, out of place. He was blessed; his life lived up to the expectation, for it was a miracle. He had not thought of it until only recently, how everyone calls birth a miracle and then stands by idly as the declaration fades away over weeks, months, years, decades--with the exact moment of termination, of course, varying widely. Then a time that was always going to arrive does, and no one remembers to revive that declaration, that sound truth, that mortal recognition of a simple, ceaseless miracle.

He had it all planned out: They’d drive him as far as they could. He’d bring his cane, of course. He’d wear his best suit and his most comfortable dress shoes. They asked why, as he sat in the kitchen and explained where in his bedroom they could find the things he needed.

"I’m going to look my best." He declared. "It’s the least I can do."

"But dad, didn’t you want to save those clothes for--" His daughter’s mouth fell still. Her eyes glinted in the kitchen light, wide and accepting and bravely swarming with love.

"I would be proud to have dirt on my shoes and stains on my shirt." The corner of his mouth turned up as his eyes glinted back at hers. "Besides, would anything else be more appropriate?"

His daughter gathered the clothes. His sons convinced him to bring a water bottle.

"I won’t need it," he protested with sweet assurance.

"Just in case?"

And he relented--he would carry water not for his own well-being, but for theirs.

They shared a meal, though he couldn’t eat it. They captured pictures and resurrected memories and gathered the present treasure with aching wisdom, that it might grant them a wealth of contentment in due time, after the last chest had been buried.

They left at dusk. They drove through puzzles of streetlamp light shattering as it hit the ground, through crepuscular mazes of infant shadows. They smiled at the lack of rain and the lack of moon, and they put the windows down so that he might remember the touch of the wind.

There were tears, but they were soft and subtle in the newborn darkness. Each embrace was a scalpel to the soul--both destructive and healing. Soon he made his slow way toward the trees, shifting his weight and positioning his cane at every step with a muscle memory so ingrained that his muscles had wholly forgotten how to carry him any other way. Warm tears nestled into the creases of his face and shivered at the kiss of the wind as he walked away without looking back.

He heard the car engine wake, the tires stir, the gravel of the road shudder beneath the weight as it all departed for a future he would not know.

The diaphanous dusk dissolved into a billowing darkness. There was a calmness here, a calmness that flared in his bones, a calmness that had been dearly unaccounted for in the hospital, away without leave as he lay restless and still in that pale plastic bed that did its best. His tears dried to a translucent stickiness and his limbs grew tired. His lungs were weary, his heart quiet but steady. He found a place to rest--no, to cease. This was no noble sojourn through stretching, tangled thoroughfares; this was but a night’s walk along a modest cul-de-sac.

He placed his cane on the ground and ignored the sighs of his joints as he lowered himself down to lay on the damp grass and stare up at the new moon sky, at the stars sprawled across it. He had always taken his creator to be a strict but kindhearted adult who paid little attention to frivolous things, but here he was struck with indisputable proof that even God was once a toddler swimming in a sea of craft supplies. For God, like all toddlers at craft time, had discovered a bottle of glitter and inevitably proceeded to splash it across his canvas in carefree autonomy. Humans had declared the work beautiful, and some even smiled when they remembered it was there, promptly looked up, and discovered that they had forgotten just how magnificent it was. Glitter, after all, is not for children but for the child-like.

His lips were thin and frozen in joy at the scene above him. There was no lifeguard for the currents of this waking ocean; no setting for these sharp and fervent diamonds. No broom for this glorious mess born from a pillar of salt which had spilled across the sky. There was no boiling water for these rebellious silk worms, glowing in the vast black fruits of their labor and refusing to spin their cocoons and so sign away their own existence, and he loved them for their frank insubordination and insufferable emotion.

He felt the chill of the ground sink through his best suit coat and into his nicest shirt. Desiring to make the most of the opportunity, he dug the heels of his most comfortable dress shoes into the humid dirt beneath him as much as he could. Blades of grass tickled the loose flesh and tired veins of his neck as he stretched his eyes wide and found sustenance in the stars alone--the stars were water in his throat, saline in his veins.

But just as the moon would emerge the next night, raw and thin and white as wax, so too would the sun return to her perch with the coming morning. The stars, for all their glory, had to abdicate the sky to her presence. It was a lovely and symbiotic cycle, and he bore it no ill-will. When dawn had crawled back atop the horizon and flung the sun back into the sky--a laughing blue striated with bands of wispy cloud--the sun stood at the edge of the earth like a doctor at the edge of the bed. She ordered life-giving doses of her light be administered to the warm, breathing world below. His open eyes glinted as the rays arrived at their charge, but there was no light within him to respond. For the distant stars had died away and he, their devout disciple, had gone with them.