The Moon Thief.

I watched the darkening of the moon, a beacon of light that cut through the hallowed night. The shadows were suffocating, pushing in around me and stealing away all of the precious air. I became concious of my breath, the inhale and exhale of my heart and lungs becoming ever more frantic. I watched in the fading lunar light my breath rise above me like plumes of smoke. My fingertips had no feeling; My ears were ringing with the deathly silence.

With my elevated level of paranoia, I saw dark figures flickering and dancing around me, like imaginary ballerinas and their partners.

Something lurking in the deep night was waiting for me. It was waiting for the moon and I, and we both trembled with the pressing blackness. I remembered my father once told me that light could not exist without darkness, and I wondered, was there such a thing as darkness without light? My father would have doubted it at the time. But if he were here now, in this very moment, I think even he would question such imediate defiance.

Now only a sliver of the moon remained, a slice of pie left uneaten. I wondered vaguely if the moon knew it was disappearing forever. If it knew that this was unlike any other eclipse it had known.

I wonder if the moon knew it was being stolen.

I thought it ironic, that the weather would turn sour at this moment, and heavy pellets of rain would pound down upon my shoulders and back. In seconds my shirt was drenched. I could hear the chorus of a thousand little voices of water. They screamed and sang and cried as they collided with the intangible forest around me. It felt as though the moon was crying, shedding tears of great sorrow. It was like it was a last attempt to drown me in guilt.

But this wasn't my doing. I was only the catalyst in this unprecedented crime.

I was not the moon thief.