two moons (2/2)
title: two moons (2/2)
word count: 2901 (6237 overall)
part one
---
“The moon is dying. There's not much energy left.”
“I know.”
“You said you’d come back.”
“I know. I just - I need to find it. Wait for me, please.”
---
When the boys at school reminisced their alien conspiracies with disbelieving words, Jensen almost allowed herself to be swayed. But the demon boy was stuck in the back of her mind, even as the months dragged on and seasons drifted away.
He told her so much, and yet she still didn’t know enough.
She still wanted to ask who are you and who are you talking to and why this phone booth, of all of them out there and so many more questions bouncing around within the confines of her skull, itching to be spoken.
In Jensen’s book, individual lines continue show the days that passed, and empty spaces show the hundreds of days to go.
Once, she left her book somewhere at school and her English teacher found it. While Jensen was oblivious to the disappearance of her most secret possession, her teacher was busy marvelling at the extent of Jensen’s imagination, how alternate worlds and lost romances and unbreakable habits can stem from the existence of the odd lonely man who walks the highway.
But then the teacher noticed the tally marks, one hundred and forty-six neat groups of five and one lonely line standing by itself at the base of each line-filled page, along with one that’s nearly half filled.
Maybe Jensen is insane, the teacher mused for several minutes, or she has too much time on her hands, until realization struck and Jensen has counted the days until the man’s return.
Jensen received her book back at the end of the day and the teacher received a suspicious yet resigned look.
Two hours after she arrived home, her parents received a call from the school.
Thirteen minutes after that, tentative knocks echoed against the door of her bedroom and it’s with a sinking, knowing feeling in her stomach and a spinning head that she opens the door.
She fabricates some sort of story about how -yes, she has spoken to the so-called demon boy and no, he’s actually very nice - and describes him as a writer of sorts with odd habits and wonderful fantasy universes which he shares with her bit by bit in each short-lived conversation.
Jensen doesn’t think it’s too far from the truth.
She was sure her parents were convinced she had some sort of unhealthy crush or infatuation with the guy, but that’s wasn’t true. She brought it up casually later on but they weren’t swayed so both parties let it drop.
They never said anything about not allowing her to see him. They asked to look at her book and she let them and they left the room in hushed whispers.
She knew her siblings knew about it, and also that they weren’t to ask her about it because voices carry easily when you can recognize them in a heartbeat.
By the time the seven hundred thirty first tally mark is drawn, everyone had nearly forgotten.
She conveniently visits home from university the week of her birthday and answers all the obligatory questions about how’s university and how different is it from high school and what are you planning to do next semester because she went farther away than anyone anticipated for university.
(She had taken her book with her, in her suitcase of possessions, and hid it from her roommate even though they’d become good friends. Somehow, she knew that assumptions would be made before she could explain herself.)
Jensen was nineteen years and several hours old when she went to see the boy again.
(Man, actually. Jensen had long since realized that he wasn’t nearly naïve enough to be the boy he appeared to be.)
Boy or man, he was still beautiful, and this time, Jensen had the capacity to recognize it.
She thought that whoever he was calling at home was very lucky.
“Happy birthday,” he greeted to Jensen’s surprise.
“You remembered?”
“You’re the only person here I have to remember; why wouldn’t I?” He glances at the phone booth, “You’re usually not here until morning, though.”
“I’ve been away at university,” she shrugged. I thought I’d say hello. My parents want me to go around saying hello to everyone tonight.”
The man hummed, “Will you come back in the morning?”
When Jensen returned in the morning, the man was still inside the booth even though the sun had crept into the sky and the moon had disappeared. She made eye contact with the man through one of the clouded glass panels around the telephone booth. His eyes were glassy, his face was aged beyond his human years, and his fingers were wrapped tightly around the receiver.
The man broke eye contact with her and dejectedly pushed the phone back into its cradle. Shoving his way out of the phone booth - like he was suffocating inside - he looked up at her, then down the highway, at his feet, then back at her.
“The moon is dying,” he said, as if she didn’t already know.
Jensen sat with him in silence on the far side of the phone booth, still away from prying eyes, wishing she knew what to say.
---
“I told you not to work so hard. I told you, I told you.”
“You told me, you told me.”
---
Jensen told the story of the demon boy to the town’s children, even though he wasn’t a boy anymore. He was a grown man, and he certainly wasn’t a demon, but he wasn’t human either. He looked human, and he was an extraordinarily beautiful human. Instead of a demon who followed the highway after two years and a day, he was the misunderstood being with an untold story that he refused to share. He was in love, and his love was worlds away, and his love relied on the moons.
Maybe the adults didn’t approve of the stories she appeared to be spinning simply to reassure the children that no, there are no demons - when demons are very much real, physically and mentally existing to each and every individual - but maybe they all decided that the children shouldn’t have to be worried about the resident ‘demon.’ Maybe they figured that the children would learn of their own personal demons eventually.
“But why,” they asked her, “why do you tell the kids about him being an alien, with this unrealistic backstory?”
Jensen had picked at her fingernails, and curled her toes, “It’s easier for them to sympathize with some fantasy world than for someone who just walks down the highway.” Rather than a boy who’s demonic persona had been crafted by overactive imaginations.
She felt a lot younger than her age, at twenty-one years old, feeling ten years old again when she had first realized that not everything her parents told her was right.
Jensen thought that if she had a list of the personality traits and ways of thinking she’d gained from associating with different people, that demon boy - or man, whichever - would be listed next to more traits than anyone else would.
Jensen greeted the man with a polite good morning. Transitioning from her teens into her twenties had caused her maturity levels to shoot up. It also increased her awareness of the hopelessness of the man’s situation, and the hope the man still carried with him.
“Good morning,” he responded.
Jensen tilted her head and blinked at the man with scrutinizing but nonjudgmental eyes. Maybe he was losing hope, too.
Jensen found she still had no idea what to say to him.
“Will you tell me,” she began slowly, “about him?”
She didn’t have to elaborate who she meant, and he didn’t have to elaborate when he said no, he can’t.
(Not that he won’t. Just that he can’t.)
---
“The human world is affecting you. Please, please come home.”
“I’m trying, I’m trying. I told you, I’m trying.”
---
Somewhere between her twenty-first and twenty-third birthday, Jensen’s little leather bound notebook collected dust in its hiding place, the days left uncounted and the pages left blank.
When she moved out of her little university dorm room with a hug goodbye from her roommate and a heavy heart, she rediscovered the book. There was no need to open it and revisit pages of stories and tally marks and the incomplete page with only four lonely lines on it, where there should have been hundreds more. She’d never be able to make up the lost time.
She resolved to go home around her birthday. She remembered the man would revisit that lonely telephone booth just a few days after that.
(She’d be twenty-three then, she realized. It will have been thirteen years since she first met the man, and although he was older than her, it was her who appeared to be the elder.)
The free time that came with having graduated from university gave her a lot more time to think than she anticipated. In the anxious days waiting for word from potential employers, she reread the nearly illegible entries she, as an adolescent, had left behind for future reference. The letters had been smudged and the pages worn by age but the words matched everything Jensen managed to pull from her distanced memories of the man.
Her parents were surprised when she called to inform them when she was visiting. They had been expected her return soon, but though that she’d rather be spending her birthday with whatever friends she’d made in university.
“No, no,” she’d insisted adamantly, “I’ll come home.” She did have her motives, after all.
She returned to the little town on the side of the highway two days before her twenty-third birthday. She brought small gifts for her parents and her high school friends who opted to stay home after high school and stories of new people and places and experiences.
Every night after her birthday, around sunset, Jensen sat by the window with a book or a mug of coffee just to have an excuse to sit there undisturbed. All when, in reality, she was scanning her eyes along the highway searching for him.
The second night after her twenty-third birthday, she glimpsed the unmistakable silhouette of the almost immortal man.
The way he walked was different than Jensen remembered. It was as if he was holding heavy bricks over his shoulders or someone was pushing at his back, yet he managed to keep his posture straight and his pace steady and his footsteps uniform.
It seemed as if he had aged more than two Earth years since Jensen last saw him. He was carrying brand new burdens with him.
Jensen met him as he left the next morning.
“I thought you went to university,” he commented casually, collapsing his weight onto the booth and sliding to the ground. He’d grown taller again - he had to tilt his head awkwardly to avoid hitting the handle of the phone booth door.
Jensen slumped ungracefully next to him. “I did. I came home for my birthday.”
“Right,” the boy stopped for a minute, “you’re twenty-two now? Twenty-three?”
“Twenty-three.”
The man made a noise in the back of his throat, “Earth years are so short.”
“I’m sure you would know.”
He tensed awkwardly and straightened his posture. “You sound like you don’t believe me anymore.”
Jensen’s heart jumped and her stomach dropped, but she composed herself quickly. “It was a lot easier for me to believe you when I was twelve, rather than now.”
A dry laugh tumbled out of his throat, and he relaxed against the booth. “You’re right. The older you get, the less trusting you are. Another thing that will break the human race.” He sighed, and pushed himself to his feet, brushing off his pants with little success. “Maybe,” he mused, “you shouldn’t focus so much on what stories I tell you. What happens to me and my planet doesn’t have as much to do with you and yours as you might think.” Squatting precariously, he made careful eye contact with her, “Worry about yourself. You’re old enough to think for yourself now.” Another humourless chuckle. “You look older than me now.”
He shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, “But while your faith in what I told you lasted, it was fun, wasn’t it? They were interesting, weren’t they?
Jensen pushed herself up as well, standing and leaning back until her shoulder blades connected with the booth. He straightened and Jensen absently thought that he is much taller than she remembered, even though she had grown herself. “You’re acting like everything you told me was something you just made up.”
“Maybe they were. You don’t have to believe anything I say, Jensen. It’s not my job to make you believe me. I’m not here for you. You were curious, so I answered the questions you were too afraid to ask.”
Jensen crossed her arms, “Are they true or not, then?”
“I just told you. That’s up to you.”
Frowning at him, “I want to hear it from you.”
He just sighed and looked away, first down the highway where he would eventually walk, then up at the sky towards a second moon she couldn’t see, then back at her, without uttering a word.
The thought crossed Jensen’s mind, finishing a momentary realization she’d had two years prior, that yes, he is most definitely losing hope. Regardless of whether his stories were true or not.
She wasn’t sure which saddened her more. His loss of his hope, or her loss of his stories.
---
“There’s nothing left of the moon anymore. No energy left.”
“There’s enough for me to call you.”
“Barely.”
---
The day before Jensen turned twenty-five, she returned to her family’s home again with a new boyfriend, one who had a metaphorically swollen heart that beat frantically with nervousness at the front door and plans to eventually return over and over and maybe one day be a part of the family.
Her family loved him right away.
Three nights later, Jensen left the house and walked out to the highway. Her boyfriend was curious, and asked her where she was going. Her family, now used to the routine, let her go, consoling him back gently. They watched through the window as Jensen approached the telephone booth.
Jensen watched the man slip into the booth, saw his shadow slump against the aged phone booth walls, and witnessed his figure slip back out ten minutes later.
---
“I love you. I'm sorry. I told you I'd come home and I never did; I'm sorry. I kept stalling and putting it off; I thought I'd have more time and now there's nothing left. I love you; I'm sorry.”
“I love you too.”
---
Jensen and the man made eye contact, and his eyes were darker and emptier and deeper than she had ever seen them.
“The moon’s dead,” he told her in a monotone. His voice was dead, too.
“I’m sorry.” She had nothing else to say.
He started walking down the hallway. Back to work in the human world, but this time, without a purpose.
---
epilogue
Old habits die hard.
Jensen had returned home and stayed in the two weeks surrounding her twenty-seventh birthday. The thought crossed her mind to stay, just to see if the man would return, but her purpose for returning was only to celebrate her birthday and announce her engagement, sticking around long enough to exhaust the excitement from friends and family.
She left five days after her birthday.
There was a dark figure a few hundred feet in front of them on the side of the highway as the sun went down, casting his shadow onto the highway, and Jensen knew his feet walking exactly along the solid white line running down the highway.
(Jensen twisted around in her seat - the moon hadn’t come up yet.)
“Slow down,” she murmured, tapping her boyfriend - fiancé now - on the arm gently.
His eyes flashed to the figure, and his foot eased up.
Jensen leaned out the passenger window as her fiancé stopped the car tentatively, not bothering to pull over.
“I thought it was dead.” She winced immediately at the words. They had sounded nicer in her head.
“It is,” he shrugged, shoving his hands into the shallow pockets of his sweater. “I’ve been doing this for decades though.” His eyes flashed up, towards the town Jensen had left behind, “Why stop now?” He looked back at her and even though his shadow clouded his face, Jensen was struck with the memory of the empty eyes he had looked at her with when she was just ten.
Dark never-ending eyes and untidy black hair - appearing every bit the demon boy she had once been told he was. Except now, he had finally aged, the years he had skipped finally catching up to him.
As if he was reading her thoughts, he laughed and Jensen nearly flinched away from the sound. It was dry, humorless, rough and unfitting in the eerie silence that belonged in the middle of nowhere. “I’m really the demon boy now, aren’t I?”
“You’re not much of a boy.”
The demon boy smirked, the quirk of his lips contrasting with his dead eyes, “In this world I am.”
“O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.”
“Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly;
Then your love would also change.”
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet