[open] loneliness has always been with me, any

[astra]

She wonders if everyone feels things so intensely or if this is something unique to him. She wonders if he has a stronger heart or if he’s simply more prone to letting his emotions consume him. She had tasted her mother’s grief in the hours following her birth, her panic. The first hours of her life had been tinged red with the clamor of chaos.

He is such a stark contrast to that. And she prefers him happy, she thinks, prefers his joy to his embarrassment. She can feel the joy that rolls off him in waves and, if she had known that he’d wondered it, she would have told him as much.

But time slows down and she asks her question and she listens intently to his answer. She wonders about his parents. About the mother that had named him Ridiculous but had not done so to be cruel. She tilts her star-stricken head and peers up at him a moment. “Who are your parents?” she asks, though there is no reason for it. She will not know the names even if he tells her. The only names she knows are her mother’s, Leonora; her father’s, Pentecost; and the magician who had fed her in the early days of her life, Isilya. And now his, too, Ridiculous.

maybe we were meant to be lonely

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