Pecipices in the Paolas Legs

To Charlie

for teaching me to fall on my feet.

To Paola Ochoa

The reasons are infinite

Chapter 1 - Origin

I once heard that shooting stars have been around for many lifetimes. On Earth we are known as small remnants of comets that travel through space. It is a wrong term to refer to meteors and comets of smaller size, in reality those are not stars. The brightness of the stars is consumed before reaching Earth so very few humans have seen us fall.  We burn in space until our light is extinguished and we die. Very few manage to survive by crashing into the stratosphere. I think the reason I didn't become a supernova when I went down was because Paola was traveling next to me.

Every 300 years the distance between Venus and the Moon aligns with the earth in the universe to allow the birth of a new star among humans. The stars fall in the hope that the planet of love, Venus, and the silver satellite will give them new life: the opening of a birth as humans. That was the night I decided to fall next to Paola. The rest of our race that is not chosen to be born, is trapped in the belt of "Van Allen".  The Van Allen belts are certain areas of the Earth's  magnetosphere where charged particles are concentrated. These belts are ring-shaped areas that expand like two spheres above the earth, containing protons and electrons from the universe, which spiral with great force the planet's magnetic poles. Many fallen stars get trapped there.  Without ever being reborn, or acquiring the form and life of a human being. That was a risk we both decided to take.

The life of the star on Earth is very easy to measure from the universe: the star's light travels during and after its death. The star is already dead, and so it can revive and reincarnate on earth during the journey of its light. We continue to live as a human, not knowing or remembering anything about our life in the universe. Until we reach our last life, through reincarnations, and finally we shut down in the universe, and die on earth. The only life I remember from my reincarnations is this one, in which Paola returned from my death a precipice.

It was close to dawn, and Paola's glow wouldn't let me sleep the morning of our fall. I had a strong pressure in my corona that extended to my star core. It wasn't until the night, cool, and serene, along with the cold winds of the north, rose imposing to make me shine that the pain disappeared and was replaced by nerves and a tingle in my photosphere that made me shine with a fun and anxious appearance, like a flashing light. From Paola's way of shining, I knew she was nervous too. I could feel my last hours enjoying the light without gravity. I let Paola know that this would be the night of our escape. She agreed shining by my side. Between his mouth and Mia there was a million-silence crossing the universe, we couldn't talk like human beings, we couldn't touch each other either. And yet Paola knew that I carried within my core – my star soul – an infinitely lukewarm love, kept inside, that could not be anyone else's. Waiting to deliver him when he crossed the sky and had her nearby. I had spent years turning off my light, slowly, I had barely fed myself the last few months waiting for this moment.  She was starving, and ready to die on Earth and leave the universe behind. If I stayed in the universe, I would become a white star the age of my hair. I would become cold like the Nordic lands, and eventually I would end up shutting down. He no longer had helium to live on any longer. I no longer wanted to live without being able to feel Paola's warmth merging with Mia. He wanted to know what it was like to hold his hand, to make love to him, to kiss the place where the sound of his laughter came from. I wanted to be human and for her to be human with me.

The night I fell, it was a night of great beauty. There was a meteor shower present. When you look at planet earth you can spend hours contemplating humans. Many of my star sisters fall in love with them, and they shine only to observe them closely. A star in love shines with such intensity that it only lasts a couple of generations. They give people the light of their hearts, watch them reincarnate again and again, and again until they become a red fireball, and finally die. Life on earth motivates them to shine, they accelerate their heat until they mature. They grow as they become brighter stars, determined to die soon. The bigger a star is, the shorter its life. Happiness is short-lived. They die soon because they consume all their energy given to love.

The truth is that they suffer almost humanly as they contemplate life on earth unattainably. My sisters look at people with exaltation, I instead look at Paola with ardor. The intimacy between Paola and me is stronger than the brightness of all the constellations that settle between us. The duration of a star is determined by the mass it possesses. Small stars like us live longer because we consume ourselves slower.

Shooting stars have always been frowned upon in our family. They are considered the most degrading thing on the social scale of the universe, like banished supernovae, rebels without a cause who unfold the molds of fate in defiance of the laws of the universe. Shooting stars usually have two ages, the age they were in space, and the age they acquire when they reach Earth, and reincarnate until they lose their brightness and die. They are left with little mass giving up the millions of years they had to live and shine in space. They choose to live among humans, and to have freedom to love. To be a shooting star is to give up eternity, and make sense of loneliness. But I was already alone, although I belonged to the constellation of the unicorn with my family; I felt misunderstood, vulnerable, and suspended in the Universe. I contemplated love on earth and felt Mia in the brightness of my soul without merging, without feeling my body with Paola's until we became one, without loving Paola.

Paola's fate was different from that of other stars. Since I was a child I always knew that Paola was born for something big, to be the brightest in the constellation of her family. Almost as bright as his aunt Carina, the brightest star in the entire universe. I always perceived in her that special brightness, almost human, and kind, without vanity or self-centeredness, her light filled with essence all the supernovae that magnetized around her. I could feel Paola's purity and want to get rid of her heat. I never fell in love with a human. I always loved Paola, although I could never touch her, or watch her do that series of rudimentary activities and those wonderful adventures they did on earth. I saw her shine suspended and far away, and that infinite pain of not being able to hug her or touch her brightness consumed me. I shone slowly, small, barely perceptible from the earth. To stay alive for thousands of enough years and observe my star, whom it made me shine, at the center of my entire existence. Until one day, I couldn't stand it anymore. The night I decided to fall from the sky, it was the night I became a mature star. I was ready to die, and become a woman.

That morning, about half past two, we saw on the east side the most extraordinary luminous meteors I had seen in many centuries. Thousands of detached bolides and kites descended to earth, pliing the skies for hours. They fell skewed to the south and seemed to be born from a bright spot in the constellation aquarius.  People were watching them from western Italy. And some places in Spain and Portugal. The wind was very light in those regions and the atmosphere would not exceed the heat that came from within me when I caught fire and fell. Meteors would give me an advantage, there was no trace of clouds and getting to earth would be easier. I wasn't sure what would happen to me once I came into contact with the atmosphere. But anyone who stargazed and made a wish would become real to me. If you are human, you just have to see a shooting star, a real shooting star, and make a wish. Then she will give you her eternity and the human will give her dreams and her desires, the star will have a new awakening from the faith that the human disposes in his desire. The shooting star will live and be born again with a human life and its karma will be guided by the desire it is meant to fulfill. It can be said that the desires of human beings mark the fate of the stars as a mysterious and invisible map that we all carry, humans and shooting stars, in our natal chart before we were born.

During the Perseid rain that night, people watched the sky and followed hundreds of asteroids, making wishes, confusing them with us. I listened to their requests like distant litanies, a million kilometers away, waiting to be fulfilled. Several shooting stars had a very different brightness that night, they were excited to listen to the wishes of humanity. I closed my eyes, or I would have done so if I had eyes, I turned off, and swallowed darkness. The reason for surviving was to trust that he would be close to Paola soon. All the meteors left luminous footprints of 10 to 12 degrees in longitude as they fell near the constellation of the unicorn that belonged to my family. I followed them secretly, looked at my sisters for the last time, looked at Paola's bright and trembling light that was beginning to move faster and faster towards the earth. I stopped breathing, and fell.

It was impossible to set the limit. The space between Paola and me began to fill with fire. I couldn't see her, nor could I call her. Only my scream could be heard, or the whisper of a silver stele behind me, entangled in hers. We passed the regions of the equinox and the brightness of our luminous strips spread behind us. Several stars stood firm as we passed by him with great speed. I remember that for the first time I was able to be three diameters from my mother the moon. It was beautiful, glowing imposing and majestic under a livid and mysterious light. I kept descending, I looked for Paola's brilliance, but there was only a trail of fire following my trail. A heat began to flood my chest. I tried to breathe but it was impossible. We were burning as we descended. He didn't know if soon, for the first time, he would see the sunrise, or if it was burning because he was dying.

I could see the Greek Islands, toured Australia, South America, Punta del Este and an infinite blue sea was unleashed on the horizon. Then a light whiter than any Paola's aunt, Carina, could have shone on me. A desire pulled me completely inward and darkness reigned.