For every tale carved in rock there are more inscribed on autumn leaves or woven into spiderwebs.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

“Everyone is a part of a story, what they want is to be part of something worth recording. It’s that fear of mortality, ‘I Was Here and I Mattered’ mind-set.”

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