Rigel
The time has come to journey. The journey has come to its most sacred path.
The caves are arduous, as they should. They only leave him little breath — gifted crevices of night, blowing cool wind on his infection, wherever the fingers of the rock quietly open up.
He hangs on to those promises of sky. He treads without rest, consumed by pain — for he knows the fosforescence will lead the way, and the clefts will eventually bloom like open doors on the heavens.
Halfway through, he must stop for a while. He lies down in a bottleneck of stone, far up the slippery bed of a stream. The hole is narrow, but it has no veils — the constellations shine their light in the caves, free from grass, cliffs and ghosts of this world.
Orion's light is a sword, a sharp cut through the sky. He watches him quiver under the weight of his shield — his belt, his blade, forever quivering in the glass sphere of the universe.
He waits, patient and freezing, until his breath shakes in tune with the cosmos. It is there, the star of this night. Rigel.
It is the foot of a giant, a marvelous foot of gas and fire. He dreams of his leg burning up there. He donates his small pain, his unbearable pain, to the crystal rays of a star that belongs to him tonight.
There are millions of steps between him and that light. He hopes to cover that distance before dawn, when he is finally free from the burden of his flesh.
The constellations invite him to listen. The rock walls hold all the secrets of this world — they were born from that primal matter, from the very same mysteries he can watch in the sky. But it is the river, not the rock, to sing the song that will lead him home. The voice of the water is woven in many things — the shaky notes of the the air counterbalance it, played through the stone flutes of the millennia.
He listens, for a while, to the music of his planet. He drinks it in, never to forget in the ages to come.
Then Rigel beckons. And he crawls back on his feet, travelling to close his distance with the stars.
With love, to laughingpinecone and emberwhite, for their birthday. May the stars lead your way for decades on.