Photo by Corey Agopian on Unsplash

Campfire’s burning slowly. It’s a dark, quiet night. We’re out of town, miles away from any urban center. Black sky’s filled with a thousand stars. Funny how living in a city makes you forget about all those dead, shiny suns. But they’re always up there, too shy to compete with men’s artificial lights.

There are chairs and tables all around us, but we’re sitting on the hard, grassy ground. It’s late, can’t say what time it is. We talked about deep stuff for a while. Now silence. No words, no laughter, not a single sound. I take a quick look at her: she’s hiding beneath a pink blanket, covering most of her face. I see flames dancing in her brown, beautiful eyes.

“What are you looking at?”

I don’t know. She tells me I should be watching the sky, like her. Yes ma’am. Shooting stars make their way in our atmosphere every two or three minutes. A night filled with wishes.

As for my mind, it’s filled with hazy thoughts. We drank rum like pirates, cursed like sailors, smoked like chimneys and now I’m thinking like a poet again. Today was a good day. An hour ago, everyone was playing, yelling, laughing. Everybody’s asleep now. I’m lost in my head, once again: love, youth, choices, tomorrows. All those shooting stars… I wonder what people wish for. I wonder what she’s wishing for. I’ll probably never know.

We’re young souls, but we ask ourselves the same old questions. What do we really want? Happiness? Love? Sex? Money? I don’t think so. I say what we want is much simpler than this: we’re yearning for friction. Something that’ll touch us, that’ll make us feel alive. World’s spinning out of control, and what we need, badly, is to connect. But we’re afraid. God, we’re so afraid. And fear is our greatest enemy in this era cluttered with emptiness. Love? Of course we want it. Who wouldn’t need a little affection? But sadly, that’s way too often all we get, way too often all we give. We’re scared. We want love, but we’re not ready for its power. So we strive forward, without ever really reaching it. We’re only trying.