• There were rings around his eyes. His face would be considered handsome, with his tan skin, deep, soothing brown eyes, straight nose, and strong jawline, but those rings, black and deep, made him look deranged and stripped him of the handsomeness. He used to be a chick magnet. The eternal envy of all men. The most sought out prize of all women. Now he was the demon everyone avoided. He still did his job well. He was still polite. He would still greet people in the morning with a smile and a wave. He would still stop to help Mrs. Miller to down her steps to get the paper, or snatch the kite the wind stole from some children in a tree. But, he no longer was the man who went to sleep each night. No longer was he the man who could sit in public without pausing to clutch his head, fending off some invisible attack. No longer was he a man people even wanted to be around. He was a man, mad, hell bent on sitting on his window ledge, or the roof of his building, or the step of his door, speaking sweet, soft words into the night sky.

    His name was Kaleb Kuekuatsu. And he was a fool.

    A fool in both this world and in one that he could never return to. The Spirit World.

    Only when the night came did Kaleb remember his woes, woes that he could not possibly explain to the people around him, woes that had been carried on for what seemed like eons. It probably had been eons since his everlasting torment started. Or it could've been the day before. Kaleb could never remember. Because he could only remember...her. Because when the night came all he could remember was her. All he could think about was her. Her pale skin, made luminous by another's light. Her dark curls bedazzled with tiny pearls of light. Her warm, yet sharp eyes, that twinkled like the stars around her. Her smile, bright and white, surrounded by lush lips, which, he remembered, she once used to kiss his forehead, his cheek, his lips, with. Her. The most beautiful and divine of them all.

    The moon.

    It was this sole reason, his infatuated adoration of her, that made the mortals he walked among walk the other way. Every night, oblivious to how people watched him, how people complained about him, Kaleb looked up to the moon, as if she were looking back down on him, and spoke to her. He sang of love, of regret, of sadness, of longing to her. His eyes would glisten when he did so, but never did he allow a single tear fall, frightened that it would make her sad and the night sky would weep with a thousand tears. And so Kaleb spoke to her. Usually it would be about the days of old, when he chased her around the Spirit World laughing, when he picked white roses, her favorite, for her and placed one in her hair, when his kissed her gently under the giant white blossom tree for the first time. Other times it would be about how he missed her, how he only wished to hold her once again, to smell her sweet skin, to look into her eyes and get lost in them as he once had. And very rarely would he tell her about his mortal life. How his mortal self could not remember anything in the morning, how trapped he was in his mortal form during day.

    But, despite his many conversations with her, each and every night, the moon made no reply.

    To any sane person, this would've meant that maybe she wasn't interested in him. Or perhaps she was an unconscious rock in the sky, as every mortal believed. But, to Kaleb, it simply meant that he could not hear her. She was a divine, glorious deity, and he a mere mortal after all. But, no matter what the reason, it still stung. Even if only a little.

    Yet, Kaleb loved her still.

    He loved her more than he did when he first met her underneath the giant blossom tree. More than he did the day he was deceived by the Trickster to leave the barrier of the Spirit World and step on this mortal plain, a place from which he could never return. More than the final moment when he could see her face, tear stained when she realized his fate had been sealed by the wiles of their love, seconds before he fell, separating them for all time. Each day, his love grew stronger, despite the fact that he could never touch her. For so long, Kaleb accepted his fate and made due with his life by continuing to speak to her. But, this day, Kaleb could not contain the other emotions he held. So, he did the one thing he swore never to do: he cried.

    "I know you're somewhere out there," he sang to her, as the tears spilled over his eyes, "somewhere far away." He put his hands in his face and continued, "I sit by myself, talking, in hopes you're on the other side, talking to me too. Am I a fool? Who sits alone, talking to the moon?" And for the rest of the night Kaleb sobbed, never knowing that somewhere far away the moon looked down at him, and with tears in her own eyes, said softly, "then I am the moon, who sits alone, talking to a fool."

    And the sky cried again for the distant lovers.