Like the tender fires of stars moments of their life together, that no one knew of or would ever know of, broke upon and illuminated his memory.

She burned too bright for this world.

They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon ans stars were as ardent as they.

What they had between them was still as fragile as a flickering candle flame, as delicate as eggshell - and he knew that if it shattered, if he somehow let it break and be destroyed, something inside him would shatter too, something that could never be fixed.

He could see in her face that she had found a freedom he did not have. Somehow this inflexible woman had become flexible, and she was beautiful in a way that he could not attain, though she was old.

He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance.

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance - that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it - then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew,
She sparkled, was exhal'd and went to heaven.

The Vestal, with her silvery content,
⁠The Lesbian, with the passion and the pain, — Which creature hath their one Creator lent
⁠More light of heaven? Who would dare restrain
The beams of either? who the radiance mar
Of the white planet or the burning star?

She was a form of life and light
That seen, became a part of sight, And rose, where'er I turn'd mine eye, The morning-star of memory! Yes, love indeed is light from heaven; A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given, To lift from earth our low desire.

If there was a religion of Annaism, and I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: in the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder. But mostly it didn’t, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn’t tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they’d never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn’t fall. She spent the rest of her time holding on to whatever scraps she had left.

What difference did it make whether they were hurt or happy, right or wrong, when the sun rose and the moon waned just the same, with or without them?

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.