Our Universe

That night when we laid with our backs on a sleeping carpet of grass, we looked up at the night and explored the vast sky. The star speckled sky stretched across the universe like wallpaper over an infinite wall. The planets shot across the sky as we played with them like marbles. The stars decorated the wallpaper in a patterned form. We broke their pattern as I used a tree branch to shoot them like pool balls into black holes. The planets swirled and spun blurry like dancing Easter eggs. We satiated our thirst as the Milky Way spilled out onto the wallpaper. We used Saturn’s rings as monkey bars to dangle above the night. I hid behind Mars and relished its warmth as we played hide-and-seek. You kicked the earth like a soccer ball, you sent it rocketing out of the solar system and made a goal into the opposing galaxy's net. You never liked earth anyway, it was too dirty, so you sent it cutting across the sky with an airless effort. When we finished, we had changed the universe. The stars were splattered on and the planets globbed on like a Jackson Pollack painting. The moon had come to watch, half of his face lit up and the other half was dark and undefined. It looked like someone pinned up the phantom of the opera’s mask. The moon watched with delight. It smiled at us because tonight his sky was our playground. We tired out and I rested my head on your firm shoulder. You looked at me with the sky reflecting back through your eyes. With a fading breath, the words, “I love you,” floated out from your rosebud lips in a warm breeze that cloaked my body. With those words the paper sky peeled from its wall and fell with slow grace like a leaf from a tree. Then the paper landed and the sky blanketed our embraced bodies. We drifted into an undisturbed sleep, warmed by the relieving glow of the stars.