She sat staring into the lake, the reflection of the moon glimmering back at her. Her heart was split, no, shattered. In a way, it was better this way, because maybe not feeling anything at the moment was better than feeling the pain and anguish she knew all to well. She let her face move up towards the sky as she took a deep breath of the cool night air. She was completely unprepared to move on, completely unprepared for the night to end and the sun to rise, the world spinning as if it hadn't stopped as it had in her heart. She didn't want to have to be okay.
She heard an owl in the distance, calling out, a lonely "Who?" It was much too apropos for the raw and salted wound festering under her chest. Who was she supposed to love now? Who was supposed to replace her world now?
A cloud passed over the moon and there was, for an instant, complete darkness. She wanted that darkness to continue, to last forever... because maybe if she couldn't see anything, she didn't have to believe it. Maybe if she couldn't see herself, she wouldn't have to see the tears streaming down anymore. Maybe if she didn't see herself she wouldn't have to see all the wonderful changes he made in her, reminding her of him.
Maybe if the deep imprint he made on her heart were to be erased in that darkness, this would all be a little easier.
The cloud moved and the moonlight shone down once more.
There was a ripple on the lake. It beamed out from the middle, gracing the quiet water and disrupting its stillness until it reached the bank where she sat. She saw its effects, how the ripples bounced backwards and hit each other and caused smaller disruptions within themselves. It was beautiful. It was then that she knew that the imprint on her heart, in the form of his name, would never go away, and she never wanted it to. All the things he taught her, all the things that rippled off of him and bounced towards her, disrupting her stillness and causing her to wake up from the bubble of herself...
She would never trade having learned all of that for the world.
A thick fog had begun to form over the lake and she was reminded of the fog that had been in her mind for too long. It slithered around until it had surrounded and covered the lake, permeating its surface, threatening to change the familiarity of it all. She couldn't stand the cruel irony.
She knew she had to let him go. But she didn't understand why. All she knew was that this weight, this heavy, foggy weight had been on her heart for much too long. It was like trying to wipe away fog on the outside of a windshield, from the inside. She couldn't do it until she stepped outside of herself and touched the cold glass and felt the truth without the warmth and safety of being on the inside.
With a shaky breath, she looked to the moon again...really looked at it. She smiled, but only for a fleeting moment, as she remembered that the moon wasn't really self-producing in its light. It was a reflection; a reflection of a light much brighter, a light much stronger, than what the moon could manage on its own. She furrowed her eyebrows as she thought about what that meant. The moon always reflected the light of its much grander predecessor, although not always in its entirety. Sometimes it only managed to show three quarters, sometimes only half, sometimes only a tiny sliver and sometimes, she realized, it never shined at all. As she thought more on this seemingly trivial fact, she thought about the fact that the earth was the reason why the moon didn't always reflect the sun. It got in the way sometimes.
And that's when she realized that she was the moon.
She was the moon!
Her one purpose was to reflect the light of the Son, but sometimes she let the things only found on earth get in the way and sometimes she became so enveloped in her life here on earth that she didn't reflect the Light at all. It hit her then that without the moon shining so full tonight, she would not have been able to see the ripples on the lake, to see them coming, to see their effects on the stillness around them. She would have been left in the darkness as she once previously wished, and the imprint would have been forgotten.
And how could she ever let that happen? Not in a million years.
It was all connected, it was all as it should be. Her heart was smashed but the Son was always burning and all she had to do was reflect its light onto the world. In the light of the Son, her heart would mend.
And with that, she sighed, and it seemed as if the fog felt the touch of something much stronger than itself as it evaporated up to the moon. It left behind a still, clear lake, ready to be disrupted all over again by the light of the Son, soon to show in the morning.
