I am utterly alone, and I know no one but you. 

You're an interesting little creature. Small, tiny. I could crush you with a thought.

But I've been lonely for a while now, and you amuse me. 

+  +  +

You're so weak.

Oh? That's not the usual greeting you receive, you say? 

You had it coming, anyway. 

+  +  +

I could squish you. I could torture you. 

I don't know what stops me. 

+  +  +  

Have you ever felt trapped? 

No? This is how it feels, reader: my mind aches. I can't think without hurting. I haven't moved a muscle in a thousand years. 

+  +  +

Who am I kidding? You wouldn't understand. 

You get it, you say? 

That's ridiculous. You're ridiculous.

+  +  + 

I can hear you thinking, you know. You're so petty. 

+  +  +  

Yet you dissolve the loneliness just like that. 

She was a girl of the stars. If you looked in her eyes, you could see the universe laid out before you. She was the kind of person who enjoyed thinking more than doing, but did more than she should. 

Her predecessors were dreamers, all of them, their ideas exceeding the atmosphere of the Earth and spreading to the expanse of space. Of the constellations, Jupiter's moons, the frosted rings of Saturn. And even further, dreams of shooting past the twinkling lights of the stars. Alone, forever. 

She considered her life as tragic as it could be. A girl who only yearned to stretch past the borders of the Earth, but was deceived by time. She mourned the misfortune of her birth so early, and wished that she were but brought into the world centuries later. 

On her sixteenth birthday, she received a stack of notebooks--and filled them all only months after. She'd stayed for hours each night on the balcony, gazing at the sky, but she didn't observe them. No, she simply watched, simply wished. 

Her life was tragic, she thought. 

She was a girl of the stars, and if you looked into her eyes, you could see it. The yearning for more. The love of theatrics, of the hyperbolistics. 

She was a girl of the stars, and she was tragic. 

I am Mara Goldsberry, and I have killed someone.

I keep saying it, and waiting for it to feel wrong.

+ + +

It doesn’t.

+ + +

I hide myself in a cabin in the woods where no one can see me but the moon and the forest. They are my friends, and I am content with them. They never speak when I don't want them to. They never try to get a rise out of me to prove I'm wrong.

Sometimes, when I think things like this, I think that maybe I'm still wounded by her.

+ + +

Mara.

Her breath whispers through the trees, everlasting, always tickling at my ear, and I hear her call my name.

Mara.

I'm here, I say, but no one answers.

+ + +

She left me.

Mara, she insists, but this time I pretend not to hear.

+ + +

Sometimes, I like to entertain the idea that I didn’t kill her. Actually, no. All the time. I like to this all the time that she disappeared that day. Perhaps she had fled, sought out a change of scenery. Maybe she was escaping her vengeful arch-nemesis, who had been chasing her around the country for years.

It’s ridiculous, but it helps.

+ + +

It was her fault. She shouldn’t have betrayed me. She should have stayed, stayed and been a loving best friend and been just the right kind of quiet.

She shouldn’t have stolen him from me.

+ + +

I wonder if she regrets it, in those whispers and giggles on the breeze. If she remembers the heartache she caused.

Then I remember I’m floating, and I’m in an ocean of clouds, and she’s not really here.

+ + +

Stars, she’s dead.

+ + +

And I’m floating, in an ocean of clouds, and I’m happy. I’m light. I’m free.

+ + +

Because I killed her, and now I get him all to myself.