I think forgetting is my biggest fear. What if you're the last person to remember before the memory disappears forever? How do I tell people I'm already nostalgic of a moment I'm still living in? How do I tell them that I want to go back and press repeat, not to change things, but just to feel them again? How do I tell them, when we're sitting across each other with our youthful smiles, that this is how I'm going to remember them, and I'll never be ready for a time when they might look different?

I want to tell them to stay in my life forever, to never grow distant so we can always have this kind of deep midnight talk on sleepovers. I want to tell them how I'm feeling completely over that family dinner, that I want us to be close forever, even after the little brothers grow up, and for the chairs to always be seated. I want to tell them that every night I wish to be the first to die before everyone I love, so that I won't have to experience the grief of losing and having to remember last.

But I won't tell them. I simply cannot.

So I write this story of a girl who came from a world of present tense, whose inhabitants cannot remember the past or predict their future. They simply cherish what becomes of them, without fear or pain of forgetting it. "The City of Stars," as Mia and Sebastian would name, is a city of blessings that ask for no return, and that's all that Lyra remembers.

She will give her blessing on Earth to be able to return to her rightful place. She must return, or she will continue to suffer the pain of remembering in a world like ours, and every time an earthling forgets a moment they exchanged with her, she'll lose her light and die a little bit inside, until she loses herself completely and vanish once she's forgotten, never to be returned to the constellations forevermore.

This is her story, and I shall leave the discovery up to her, for these things are quite beyond my understanding. After all, this world doesn't make so much sense.

Yours truly,

Kesha Keeps

art by unknown artist

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