Isella, the moon.

A long time ago, long before you and I, Isella, the moon, fell in love. She was more beautiful than you can ever imagine, with white skin and freckles and eyes that shone brighter than stars. She was in love with Lother, a man, and so her family disapproved. “You should not love a man, they are mortal and quarrelsome and thoroughly un-poetic,” they said, “you should love Almer, the wind or Umber, the sun, far more fair and noble than any man on earth”. Isella, as is to be expected, disagreed. She loved Lother, she loved his eyes, his innocence, his way of looking at the world, . So her family came up with a plan: they decided to leave it to chance. One day they took Lother to a dark, empty room, with two doors. “Choose wisely,” they told him “for behind one door lies Isella and if you open we shall make you immortal so you can be with her forever. Behind the other there is nothing and if you open it you shall never see Isella again”. Lother thought about it for a minute and then chose the left door. He opened, half expecting to see her inside, waiting for him, but there was nothing inside.

At that moment he felt like crying, but he would not cry in front of her family, especially not in front of Umber, the Sun, who stood there smiling for now Isella was all for him. He left without saying anything. It was still early in the morning, a beautiful day. The birds sang and the sky was blue, and everything seemed perfect except it wasn’t. Because he had just lost her forever. He imagined her crying and that made him feel even worse. At least he would someday die, after all, he was a man. Isella, however, was condemned to live all eternity without him.

He went along the path beside the stream. He wanted to go to the place where he saw her for the first time, but that would be too painful. He remembered that day: it had been a especially hot one, in summer and she was looking at some flowers by the stream. Barefoot, with a white dress, she stood there like she was some magical creauter. Well, she was the moon, a goddess, after all. He felt like he had been created for that moment. Watching her there, so concentrated in the flowers, made him feel like he was the first thing to ever be like, he was watching the world, the universe, being born. Time passed and they grew to love each other. There was something tragic about it, as they knew that they could never be together, no matter how much they wanted it. For she was the moon, and he, a man.

As he walked home, everywhere around him he saw something that reminded him of her. He wondered if he would feel like that until the day he died. He would never love someone else, that he knew. He decided he would build a cabin in the woods and live there the rest of his days. He would grow a garden and fish in some stream and maybe get a dog. It felt as if he was missing an arm or a leg, as if he was slowly dying, as if he could not breathe. Without her, nothing made sense. But he also had read the old stories, he knew that’s how people felt when they lost someone they loved.

That day he had woken up thinking he would see her. They had planned to go swimming. If he had known he would never see her again, he would have kissed her one more time and held her longer in his arms. Instead, he had gone home trusting he would see her again.

He spent the rest of the day seated beside the fire, thinking. At night he finally got up and left the house not fro any reason in particular, only because he felt like going outside. He was surprised to see that the night wasn’t as dark as it always was. He looked up and he saw a big, white ball in the sky. It was strange, he had not seen that before, never, and he could not make up exactly what it was. It irradiated a light that made it seem magical and divine. He looked at it for a long time and then it all came to him suddenly. It was her, the whiteness of her skin and the freckles on her face. He started crying, with joy. It was her, Isella, more beautiful than ever. He danced and sang like a mad man, and so other people called him a lunatic, someone that was moon-sick. But he wasn’t sick, only madly in love. He ran away to the mountains, to the place of rock and mist and ice, to be closer to the moon, closer to Isella.

Isella, when she heard about what her family had done, ran away. She refused to marry Lother, the Sun, so she chose the night as her refuge, where he could never reach her. She tried not to feel sad, for she was the moon, prettiest, and most magical of creatures. And then she transformed into the moon as we know it, so that her lover could always see her and so that she could be his light and guide even in the darkest of nights. That’s why the moon is white and freckled and only comes out at night, when she’s safe from those who tried to take her away from Lother, the man she loved. She knows someday she will be with her lover, for though he died a long time ago she is a goddess, and so knows that nothing is by chance and that what happened once, if it was meant to be, will happen again.

She tries to be happy, but sometimes is not, that’s why if you look up at the night sky, from time to time, you will see shooting stars, which are not really stars but tears from the moon, because she, too, sometimes cries.