Once upon a time there was a star that tripped and fell while dancing in the night sky, and tumbled to earth as a girl. When she woke up, the girl did not know who or where she was, only that the darkness above her, speckled with bright spots of light, looked familiar. She had no clothes or name, and when she came to the nearest village, the men and women thought that she was a witch. Since she did not know what a witch was, she couldn’t correct them. They threw stones at her until she ran from them, bruised and afraid.
She found comfort in the darkness, in being alone under the stars. The animals of the forest were kind to her, and brought her things to eat—nuts and berries, roots from the ground that she washed in the river. She did not know how to speak to the animals, but they listened anyway. At night, she washed her hair in the river and sang wordless songs to keep herself company. In time her hair shone as bright as the moon.
The girl slept during the day, under the cover of trees. At night she walked bareheaded beneath the sky; eventually she made her way to the mountains and up among them. She grew to know the trees around her by name—their real names, not the names humans give them—and for a time she was happy, or as happy as she could be while knowing that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be.
One evening, while making her way through the mountain woods, the girl came across a boy—a young man, really, creeping quietly through the underbrush, tracking a deer. She was frightened—she remembered the stones—but the boy had a kind face, and he hadn’t seen her, so she followed him in silence, curious to see what he might do.
When the boy lifted his knife some time later, the girl understood his intention and cried out. The boy, surprised, whipped around to face her and threw the knife before he could help it. The blade caught the girl’s long hair and pinned it to a tree, driving deep into the wood. Unable to free herself, the girl looked into the boy’s eyes and saw the villagers and their rocks, but also the trees the boy had climbed as a child, the rivers in which he’d washed his own hair and sung his own songs.
She opened her mouth, but she had no words.
“I’m sorry,” the boy said, and he reached for the knife. “I didn’t see you.”
The girl did not understand this, but if she had, she would have told him that the people in the village hadn’t seen her either. She stayed still as he pulled the blade out of the tree. The deer was gone now, safe somewhere in the trees, and for that the girl was grateful.
“Are you lost?” the boy said, but the girl didn’t understand this either. Instead she walked away from him, up the steep mountain path. The boy followed her because he could.
The boy did not know what he was starving for, in truth. But neither did the girl.
As he followed her, the girl became restless and worried. She began to run faster, but the boy kept up—they climbed higher and higher, each one of them afraid of and afraid for the other. The boy chased the girl right up to the peak, so high they could see clouds far below. At the edge, the girl turned back to face the boy.
He held out his hand. “I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Please believe me. Please say you believe me.”
But the girl had no words and could not speak. She took a step back and the ground crumbled beneath her feet. The boy reached for her but he was too late. She fell and her hair fanned about her like moonlight.
Oh, the girl thought. I remember this feeling. She fell down and then up, into the bottomless expanse of the sky, her moonlight hair shining with a different kind of light now, a light fresh and made of stars.
The boy did not see this. But then, he hadn’t seen the real girl anyway. He’d only ever seen his dream of her.