“I love you but I will not sit here and wait for this story to change. I am going to make it change.”

It looks a breath away from being a crumbling ruin. Held together by spinning planets and ticking clocks and wishful thinking and string.

This is where we leave them, in a long-awaited kiss upon the Starless Sea, tangled in salvation and desire and obsolete cartography.

Once there was a woman who sculpted stories. She sculpted them from all manner of things. At first she worked with snow or smoke or clouds, because their tales were temporary, fleeting. Gone in moments, visible and readable only to those who happened to be present in the time between carving and disintegrating, but the sculptor preferred this. It

Sometimes it’s like Kat from Before is just someone I passed on the street.

“A book is an interpretation,” she says. “You want a place to be like it was in the book but it’s not a place in a book it’s just words. The place in your imagination is where you want to go and that place is imaginary. This is real,”

A book is made of paper but a story is a tree.

She slows to look at the paintings hung between the shelves of books, images of trees and girls and ghosts.

He considered asking the woman what manner of key she sought so he might help her look but he knew how difficult it was to describe a key. To find a key you had to understand the lock.