Star Trail to the Sea

         He didn't believe in God - he believed in stardust. Milo was adamant on the belief that everything ("from the air to the trees to the freckles on your face") had its origins in small, drifting grains of light. I asked him where stars came from if they didn't come from God; he asked me where God came from at all. Neither of us had answers.

         Milo had gone missing exactly 72 hours ago. I found out exactly 67n hours ago. Police found traces of blood 3 hours ago. 3 hours and 4 minutes, to be exact.

        Make that 3 hours and 5, I think as I look at my watch. My gaze follows a gull as it hops along the exposed low-tide shore, picking at battered shells before taking off towards the cloud-clotted skies. Waves threaten to take me, charging forward before creeping back towards the tumultuous sea. They won't take me. Even if I want them to, the waves won't take me. 

       Night comes as I watch the waves lap closer. The frigid, salty air leaps up like frozen sparks, sudden and sharp, dancing along my skin and combing through my hair. It's now been 76 hours since Milo disappeared. I think about his last conversation with me. 

      "What if I died tomorrrow?" he had asked, sitting beside me on the shore.

      "You won't, Milo," I'd promised with a tepid smile. His dark hair was disheveled in the wind, the hem of his jacket being tugged the way it would if a child was pleading him to come. Come to the Sea, Milo, pleaded the smallest unseeable flecks of stardust. Please, come to the Sea.

      His eyes were mottled shades of pallid grays and deep blue-greens. They churned the way the waves do just before a storm. "You don't know when I'll die," he whispered, "and I don't know where I'll go after. Heaven or Oblivion? Decay or stardust?" He looked at me. As usual, we sat in a mutual loss for answers, a loss for words.

      It's been 3 months, 8 days, and 6 hours since Milo went missing. 3 months, 4 days, and 5 hours since they'd recovered his body.

     They found him lying limp on the rocky teeth of the shore at low tide, as battered as a hollow shell. Some claimed that it was murder. Some claimed suicide. All I know is that I found a note stashed in his jacket pocket. He'd left the coat in my closet, buried beneath things that had been long lost and long forgotten. The note I found was discovered exactly 17 minutes before his body was retrieved. It simply said, I took the Star Trail to the Sea. 

     I sigh. Still, the waves won't take me. Not today.