Talking To The Moon

December 2021.

Written by: Haya A. Elmizwghi

Edited by: Fatima M. Mami
Published by: Fasila

The full moon illuminates the midnight sky, with all its crooks and crevices, its stars and secrets.

Night has won the battle; darkness has conquered the sky. All the dead creatures squirm in their graves; all the living ones squirm in their beds—all but one…

A child, silently perched on a windowsill, with her heart bleeding through her hand onto a paper.

“Back so soon, my child?” asks the moon, focusing her everlasting glow on the child.

The child is so engrossed in her writing that she fails to notice her. Neither does she notice when the moon, ever-so-slowly, ever-so-silently, creeps across the night sky, lurking until she is finally able to just peek over the child’s shoulders.

She is stunned by what she sees.

“What is this that you are writing, my child?” the moon asks curiously.

Startled, the child attempts to turn the page but ultimately fails. Turning her tear-stained eyes up to the night sky, she answers, “Stories that are not my own.”

Truly, with jittery hands and a blurred mind, she writes; worlds sprout from the tip of her pen, of chivalrous men, of damsels in no distress; worlds of ecstasy with no misery, of love without pain, of life without death; worlds that do not mimic our own… The paper is no longer merely a paper; rather, it is a window into that world.

“Why do you write, my child?” the moon inquires with her nomadic wisdom.

"I write because..." the child stays silent for a moment, then she says, “When the world tears me apart, I write. Not to fix it or to make it better, but to make myself better. I write out of need, not out of want. On such days, when my voice fails me, my words don’t, so I write.”

The moon looks proudly at her, and simply says, “Keep writing, dear.”

And so the child does—she keeps writing.

The child writes out of pain; she writes out of sorrow; she writes out of desperation, out of lack of better options. She writes as if she’s gasping for air—out of necessity.

She writes in hope of filling the inner void that could never truly cease to be. She writes.

The child keeps writing until her hands, her mind, and her heart ache.

The child writes until all the ink seeps out, staining both the paper and her frail hands.

She writes until her ideas abandon her; just like everyone else.

“Farewell, my child!” the moon lulls with her majestic voice.

“So soon!” the child exclaims. “How fast the night passes when one’s pouring their heart out!” She adds.

“Indeed, my child.”

“Please, don’t go!”

“Don’t fret, we shall meet again,” the moon reassures her, “The sun is here, he will illuminate your world.”

“No, all the sun does is revive the monsters of the day.”

The moon looks sadly upon the frail child, on the brink of fading away. “You can make it, I believe in you.”

The child looks upon the ruins of her world, now stark with the new sunlight.

And with a pen in one hand, a paper in the other, and the new-found trust in her heart, her world seems a bit less scary.