Chapter 1
THE FIRST CHAPTER
The world inside of me, the place my writing came from, was chaotic and complex, a smaller prism of the world I lived in.
It was populated by its own characters, its own oceans and mountains and stars.
It fought its own wars and survived its own famines and cured its own diseases.
It fell in love and grieved and enacted its own crimes of passion, many of which never became manifest in my own apparent life.
My world would die with me one day, in silence, without any contact with the equivalent alien races, the people that walked around me day after day. That thought had unsettled me for years. If I wanted to make contact, then no one else could initiate it—I just needed to know how to do it myself.
I could never calculate how alone I was in this.
Some people assured me that my inability to address or express those deepest thoughts was a common human condition, but no one else I knew ever seemed to see it the way I did.
I lived with my arms perpetually outstretched to monumental treasures just out of reach, my own unrealized self-worth—why did no one else look in the same direction if there was anything here worth finding?
I expressed myself through creative writing, but I could have gone with anything else.
I still couldn’t say what made me settle on writing in particular.
The black letters on a blank white page didn’t catch people’s eyes like painting or sculpture.
The words read in silence would lack the vivacity of music sung aloud.
But writing was direct. I could say what I meant and cling to it like a life raft in the hopes of spotting the rescue ship of my hopeful discovery one day.
Over the span of my life from a childhood surrounded by books, I had learned all the intricacies of narrative, of storytelling and poetry and wordcraft.
From an academic standpoint, I lacked nothing.
I had my degree, and everyone encouraged me.
But the spiritual element of my writing eluded me.
I felt that I hadn’t been called so much to write, as to invoke—but I couldn’t discern what I was supposed to invoke.
More and more I feared that I would never live to herald the message entrusted to my subconscious. No, I would be relegated to the sidelines as an entertainer. A court jester instead of a prophet. I had accessed the test, but I could not pass it.
Or at least, not until I met Aster.
I had won my residency here at Illumination Point.
I wrote an essay about “heritage,” a simple prompt with an expensive submission fee on the heels of a half a dozen other competitions I entered at the same time.
Sometimes I still wonder if I won the contest rightly, or only because of a serendipitous fluke.
Victory celebrations were foolish when the victory itself was temporary.
I needed to repeat my successes if I wanted a future in this field, and I worried that I never could.
Never before had my writing distinguished me.
I couldn’t create something like that on demand.
Maybe that essay was the only true inspiration I had ever known.
If Aster taught me anything about the technical aspect of writing during our first couple weeks, he taught me that I spent too much time thinking about it.
He didn’t like thinking about writing, or art, or any of the kinds of things muses were meant to inspire.
He cared more about the lighthouse or the ocean or making trips to the village nearby to spy on people and find new foods for dinner.
He didn’t like artistic or decorative language but the intricacies and insinuations of everyday conversation instead.
Something changed about our relationship after that kiss.
Until then, we’d kept our relationship platonic and professional.
I liked it that way and wouldn’t have changed it on my own.
Aster knew precision. He knew how to say things, how to recall hypothetical events in a way that would lodge into a reader’s mind forever.
We had known that we harbored strong feelings for each other.
Even if things hadn’t taken an explicitly sexual bent, we wanted to know more about each other.
I wanted to know more about him. Not just the facts, laid out in autobiographical drabness, but about his soul.
About what he wanted to find. He had a quest, but he remained quiet about it while poking me around the edges for clues.
Likewise, I assumed that he wanted to know more about me as well. He frequently adored me. Even when he criticized me work or intent, he did so from the vantage point of someone who found me utterly fascinating.
But we were never equals. I was the artist and he was the muse, and the imbalance between us had kept our relationship on the proper course…
Until the kiss. The kiss made us equals. It declared that we could share anything with each other, that we were two people in an increasingly confusing universe and that we could both go further if we teamed up.
My energy had changed that night. Not my enthusiasm, not my will to do better. I felt like a different person after kissing Aster, like my soul had been renewed or even transplanted with something better and more powerful.
The next day I assumed at first would be like the others, unproductive but dazzling. Aster and I planned to picnic on the beach. I would have resisted before, but now I sensed that resisting Aster meant resisting my greater calling. I still had much to learn about surrender.
I started the morning alone, as usual. When I verified that Aster wasn’t waiting for me behind a corner, I wrapped myself up in a teal silk bathrobe over my nightgown and slipped on a pair of sparkly tourmaline earrings I had bought on one of our outings.
I went to my writing desk as soon as I came down the stairs, but not because I was eager for a project. I was done with conventionality. I closed my notebooks and put my laptop back in its case. Today I would not even try to write.
I approached my desk with a feeling of trepidation, a sense that the floor would fall out from me if I took a step back or lightning would hit me from out of the sky.
Aster still wasn’t here. I wondered if our kiss had broken something, if this time when I called, he wouldn’t come back.
Alternately I feared I would have nothing to say to him if I saw him again.
Aster wanted me. He said so. He wanted to hold me, to kiss me.... He loved me more than he loved anything my writing could aspire to.
I glanced around the room in final preparation, at the squares of sun shining on the hardwood floor from the east-facing window, and then I spoke his name aloud. “Aster.”
I didn’t know how Aster filled his nights or any time when I wasn’t around.
He said he stayed awake, stayed present.
Beyond that, I never saw him disappear at night.
Instead we would say goodnight, and I would walk up the stairs to the bedroom alone.
After that I wouldn’t see him until I summoned him.
Whenever I woke up in the morning, I found myself alone.
Early on, I would wait until I had adequately prepared for the day before I called Aster.
I wanted him to see me all dressed up and ready for action.
Lately I realized that he didn’t care about action, or about the different summer styles I knew how to wear. Besides that, I liked his company.
This morning, like every morning, Aster appeared before me and turned his head at the sound of his name.
Every time I saw him like this I shivered anew.
The wonder of seeing him just didn’t get old.
It was a miracle, watching him appear every morning, a private miracle that breathed life into me every time I witnessed it.
Good morning, Stella, he greeted, both charming and obedient.
“What should we do today?” I asked.
Aster looked surprised at the question. Usually he was the one who asked it, not me, but after the kiss, any order between us had fallen through the cracks.
You tell me what to do. I can’t make that kind of decision. I can’t… He stopped speaking with his lips parted, and the rest of what he wanted to say hung crystallized in the air between us.
I slipped my finger over his lips. “Then I’ll decide,” I said. “I’m not afraid of it now. Last night—well, it changed me. It changed everything. I feel like a new person, inside and out.”
He winced. I didn’t mean to change you. His voice trembled.
Sometimes Aster sounded alarmed—like the time when I first started asking him questions after we first met.
I dismissed his concern as a cute personality trait, a sign that things mattered to him.
That I mattered to him. This was different. Heavier.
“But I think I understand it now,” I said.
“Seriously. The writing is incidental. It’s my life that matters.
And we have a whole summer to spend here at the lighthouse.
There’s still so much I haven’t done. We should watch the sunset from the catwalk outside the old light chamber.
Or have a picnic by the beach, or travel the area… ”
Aster’s eyes looked far away. I turned around, realizing that he wasn’t looking at me but at the old secretary desk behind me.
In the past, Aster hadn’t so much as noticed my writing desk. I hadn’t pointed it out to him, either. Whenever I wanted to talk about my writing or my need to feel productive, I would jump straight to the subject matter or the craft with little thought of how I wrote it.
Now he walked around me and looked down at the closed laptop and the wire-bound notebooks stacked on top of each other next to it. He brushed against the surfaces of the notebooks with his fingers, and suddenly I felt as if I had done something terrible by closing them and setting them aside.
“I want to spend more time alone with you and not worry about the writing,” I said.
He straightened, turned around, and looked at me at last. Have I done something wrong?
“Don’t even suggest it. You were right. I was wrong when I kept hitting that nail on the head.
There are so many things more important than…
that…” My own words became lost now. My gut tensed in agitation.
Here I’d tried to beat Aster at his own game and found myself utterly unprepared.
“Look, I’m trying to play the part. But I need help.
I want to see things the way you do, Aster.
I want to follow all of your advice just for one day… ”
You put me on a pedestal, didn’t you? he observed, fascinated.
My cheeks burned. “I didn’t put you anywhere.”
A shadow covered his face, and the ratty cross on the wall behind him came into focus over his left shoulder.
“I just want to know what you think I should do,” I said. “And I’m sorry about last night… if it was not what you wanted.”
It wasn’t, said Aster. Then he softened. He reached behind himself and picked up one of my notebooks from my desk.
I blushed. This particular notebook was where I wrote down various ideas and concepts that I liked, including lines of poetry or images that stood out to me.
Aster opened it at the one-third mark, where I had scribbled a few notes about lightning and improbability.
The notes didn’t embarrass me. What embarrassed me was the doodling around the margins, large twisted clouds and streaks of lightning like spiderwebs covering a significant portion of the page.
I always doodled when I was thinking, and sometimes like now I wished I’d picked up a less conspicuous habit like biting my fingernails.
I licked my lips and prepared for a critique. He was at it again, about to tell me how I was approaching everything wrong, how like in a vintage sports movie I needed to train myself through every aspect of life before I could so much as write the alliterative opening line of a poem.
Then he looked up at me, and the corners of his lips turned up in a smile. This is a good page, he said. You should write it out. Turn the storm into something.
I checked the page again to better prepare myself in advance. “Into what?”
I don’t know. Show me.
So I sat behind the desk. I opened up my laptop and started a new document.
First I typed out everything that I had written in the notebook spread.
When I finished that, I kept going. A running metaphor of chance and luck ran through my head as I worked, and before long, I realized that the writing could translate to an abstract piece of fiction or creative nonfiction.
The rest of the day passed around me as I wrote.
Occasionally I stopped to stretch my arms or get a new drink of water, but then I would return and keep writing under Aster’s gaze.
He didn’t speak. Sometimes he stood at my side, leaning over so that his face was next to mine.
Sometimes I found him in the back of the room, sitting at the antique tea table on the other side and tracing over the wooden grains with his pale finger.
Before I knew it, I had completed chapter one.