StarMaker

CHAPTER 1

The End is the Beginning

When the last light shone into this world we knew we were goners. Every horrible dark thought surged through every cell of me as the sun darkened for the last time. A teeny tiny tear gathered at the corner of my eye, holding itself back in a last hope of …. something, anything to take away the clawing despair.

As that tear glistened, awaiting the torrent that lay behind it, my eyes fell upon the heart shaped locket my grandmother had given me as a child. I don’t know why I wore it all these years. Perhaps because she was the strange one in the family, always offering out hope with a dash of a magical spell that sometimes seemed to work.

The memories of her dancing with me through rippling streams and wandering through green forests swept through me, right along with the horror of understanding that that would all be gone now. Swept with the extinction of the sun into oblivion with only my memories of it remaining. Memories of tiny bare feet racing over tree stumps and river rocks. Of staring up into blue skies at clouds making moving picture stories to while away a summer’s day.

‘No!’ I shouted into the descending darkness. ‘No.’ It cannot all be gone like this. So much beauty. So much wonder. So much joy.

I don’t know what spurred me in this moment of impending despair to grab hold of that locket and hold it to my heart. ‘Gran, if you’re there, HELP me!!!!’

The locket began to vibrate in my hands, then swirled in circles as I let it go. It flew open and from inside its crusty old frame, a bright green light shone. A light that reached out and pulled me in. There is nothing to do but surrender to its enchantment as there is nothing left here for me now. Maybe HOPE waited somewhere inside its walls of wonder. Maybe a new sun shone in a new world somewhere. Maybe there I could learn to pluck stars from the infinite skies to birth new suns and the life that would bring.

'REMEMBER ... remember ... remember', whispered a voice with the joyful cadence of my gran.

As I felt myself sucked into the locket's swirling chasm of hope, the remembering burst through me. With my very last breath of Earth, I knew ... that I am a star maker, a god of sun making ...and I vowed that I would not fail again in my future worlds.

CHAPTER 2

Alice in Locket Land

I am captured, no maybe captivated is more like it, in this swirling mass of swirling lights, as if comets and stars are whirling past me at hyper speed. Am I in a black hole, moving from one part of the universe to another? Am I like Alice in Wonderland, in a hypnotic state of despair, searching for an answer to a question which defies understanding? Or am I truly speeding through a locket portal into a new version of myself somewhere far far across the galaxies?

I wait to feel dizzy, who wouldn’t with all this going on around them. But it isn’t like that. It feels strangely normal to me, as if I belong here in this pathway between worlds. There’s no one else here. No gran to steady or guide me. No relatives waiting at the proverbial gate to greet me. No, I am on my own for now and that feels strangely great, especially considering the demise of the planet I’m leaving behind.

I feel myself growing grander by the moment, as if some automatic expansion is happening to me as I glide along across the galaxies. Some remembering which holds with it an enchantment to become that which you remember. The remembering and the expansion are one and the same thing it seems. I grow and grow and evolve more and more as the seconds (?) tick by.

I am awed by the feeling of it all. Enchanted by the universe. Enthralled by the wonder. My feet seem to be dancing across stars, a lilting pathway to what I do not know. There’s excitement in every cell of me, replacing the despair that just moments ago held me in its abysmal thrall.

I really can’t say that it seems as if it’s going on forever because I’m pretty sure I’m outside of time. Here I am eternally anything and all that I wish to become. That heavy yoke of human’ness has lifted from my neck. The weight of feet grounded in gravity is replaced by a lilting lightness of being that lets me flit, and even fly if I want, to any place in the universe I desire.

With that thought, the portal began to slow, if slow or fast can be applied as a concept to something totally extraordinary like this. I see a large hand (seemingly made up of sparking sea glass) reaching out from a point of light in front of me. It’s beckoning me forward, inviting me to grasp that wavery watery hand so it could pull me willynilly out of this swirling vortex of wonderment. What the heck, I thought, and reached out my hand to take his…………………

[to be continued]