Everlong

She sits at the same bench, in the same park, every night. Mostly it rains, every now and then it snows, but the clear, cloudless nights are her favorite. She has made friends with the stars, has made a mother out of the moon, and she greets them all like the old friends they are. When ice begins to spiderweb over the earth, she looks forward to basking in Aries’ warm gaze. In the Spring, Leo winks and sends her budding flowers. Once, time was tracked by the length and frequency of their visits. Words like ‘years’ or ‘weeks’ have become foreign, and she does not understand them well enough to use them. She used to make notches on the wooden slats of her bench every time Cancer visited her summer sky, but while she slept the bench was replaced, and she has since lost track. Now, instead of tracking the stars, she measures time in written pages. In a small room, perched at the top of an abandoned stone building, she keeps the decaying walls lined with the broken spines of adopted books. Most are stained, incomplete remnants fished from the large dumpster behind the city’s public library—relics from a time when she wandered the network of streets and alleyways with no purpose other than to do something. A time before she found her bench; before she found a purpose hiding in the empty spaces of lined paper. The books offer her a glimpse of a world outside her own, but it is the stories she has mapped out in mismatched ink that gives her existence meaning