# Moonstruck The night the moon hung full and heavy over the city, Rina stood at her apartment window with a cup of cold tea she'd forgotten to drink. The moon had a way of doing this to her—pulling her out of herself, making her forget small things like tea, like sleep, like the man who'd left three weeks ago. She'd never been superstitious, not really. Her mother was the one who counted days and phases, who wouldn't cut her nails on certain evenings or start new ventures when the moon was waning. But standing there, watching silver pour across the rooftops like milk spilled from an overturned pitcher, Rina understood something she'd always dismissed before: there was a reason people went mad under full moons. It wasn't mythology. It was just what happened when the sky insisted on being so beautiful, so present, so utterly indifferent to your loneliness. The tea had formed a thin skin on its surface. She set it down on the windowsill. Below, the street was almost empty. A old man walked his dog—the same old man who appeared every night at this hour, she'd noticed. The dog was ancient, moving as if through water. They took their time. They had nowhere to be. There was something noble in that, she thought. The refusal to hurry toward anything. Her phone sat silent on the kitchen table. She'd stopped checking it around midnight. He wasn't going to call. The month-long silence had made that clear enough. She'd replayed their last conversation enough times—the flat way he'd said *I think I need to be alone right now*, the kindness in his voice that somehow made it worse—that she could recite it like a prayer. And like all prayers, repetition had drained it of meaning. The moon climbed higher. It was so bright she could see without turning on the lights. Her apartment, rendered in shades of silver and shadow, looked like a photograph of itself. She moved through it like a ghost, or like she was watching someone else move through it. In the bedroom, she lay atop the covers without undressing. The moon came through the window and painted her hands silver. She held them up to the light, turning them slowly, as if they belonged to someone else. As if she might recognize herself in them if she looked long enough. Sleep, when it came, was thin and restless. She dreamed of walking through a city made entirely of moonlight, where everything was equally real and equally unreal, and she couldn't remember whether she was looking for someone or running from them. In the dream, she called out a name—she didn't know whose—and the sound evaporated before it left her mouth. When she woke, the moon was already sinking toward the west. Dawn wasn't far away. Soon the moon would become pale and thin, a ghost of itself, and the world would return to its ordinary proportions. She would get up. She would drink coffee. She would answer the emails she'd been ignoring. She would live the day. But for now, in this liminal hour before sunrise, the moon still held dominion. And Rina lay still, letting it have her. Letting it pull the grief up from the small places where she'd been storing it, pretending it was something else—restlessness, insomnia, a passing mood. The moon knew better. The moon knew exactly what was happening inside her, and it didn't look away. Outside, the old man with his ancient dog had long since gone home. The street was empty and silver. The city slept. And above it all, the moon—indifferent, radiant, cruel—continued its slow descent toward the horizon, taking what it had stolen, leaving Rina alone with the light and the silence and the terrible knowledge that tomorrow would be exactly like today. She waited for dawn the way one waits for a sentence to end.

# Parallel Worlds

There are parallel worlds, alternative realities that reveal themselves only in dream. There are brief messages we receive without understanding why we were chosen to hear them. This is not my first encounter with the moon in sleep. Last night it hung there like a vast metal sphere—menacing and magnificent in one breath. It floated among some rocks, yet I knew with certainty it could roll toward me at any moment, just as on another night I dreamed the real moon itself was descending, massive and luminous, rolling down the valley toward us. Around me stood people I’d never met, yet we all ran in the same direction because no matter how deeply the terrible thing fascinates you, you will still need to flee.

In quarantine, the walls of our house press upon us differently. Thoughts cannot escape; they find no passage out of our lives. They return faster than you’d believe, bouncing against you through the rooms, beginning to scratch, to wound. Every slender beam of light glimpsed through an open window becomes the most vivid thing you know of the world beyond—that reality where you could still walk without fear catching in your throat. Fear of what? You gather your thoughts; you compose your words. You could tell people, if they should ask what you dreamed last night.

Tell them how the moon is far more significant than we perceive it in the sky, even when it hangs orange and full—how it somehow manages to slip close on certain nights, close to your bed, into your dreams, so near that it places a hand of light upon your shoulder and draws you into this place where everything appears exactly as it seems, where the strange world has no name. The moon even manages to transmute reality into such enchantment that it travels unimpeded across the earth, into desired dimensions. It almost becomes a plaything in the hands of those who would one day learn to command it. They live encircled by satellites, which may be nothing but signs of these worlds prowling at the edges, unseen by those who sleep and forget their visions in that first blink of dawn.

Are we of this world, or are we not? We are caught now between two realities—one we could never have foreseen, yet one many of our grandparents and great-grandparents lived through. It terrifies us that we no longer possess the freedom we never thought to value. For when you lose small fragments of your daily reality, the freedom to step forward in whatever direction you choose, only then do you begin to love it, and above all, to defend it with your whole life.

Who says, after all, that we cannot perform acts of courage in the privacy of our dreams? I have a habit—unbidden, unwilled—of traveling to nearly the same places, of dreaming through the same houses again and again, and I have even developed the conscience to wonder whether the neighbors have changed or remain as they were in dreams past. I find these places, these apartments, these buildings that no architect, however gifted, could describe or render on paper—they seem to me all manner of ‘home,’ and I know, each time, that I have been there before, that this is not my first time dwelling in a dream, that my home has the highest windows that could frame, should she wish it, the whole moon.

Do we become someone different in solitude? I don’t remember dreaming of the moon so often. Perhaps it is descending into our homes the way deer wander through the streets of cities where no one seems to live anymore. That scenario unfolds—the one where an earth without humans would obey, in the shortest span of time, the laws of nature. You begin to see it happening before your eyes. Wouldn’t that be magnificent? But you cannot let your mind press too hard; we would immediately overflow the sidewalks, the streets, the woods, at the slightest sign that the clouds have cleared, at the first impulse that we might resume our half-finished, loud and vicious lives. And it all crumbles there—a path from which we learn little, perhaps, but enough to ready ourselves for a future in which the moon might find the courage to visit us. In the daylight of our reality, the undreamed, we must be prepared to give back, to leave to the deer what belongs to the deer, to the crickets what is theirs.

Let us be ready for that moment when the sky empties itself, when the clouds grow heavier than ever and press close to choking us—ready to give back, to abandon our cars as in any film we have seen and seen again, in our peace, with isolation and hope as our guide, with the faith that our gesture, global and universal, will cleanse the world of poisonous and corrosive thoughts. And we shall see one another gradually, at the first embrace, kinder and gentler than ever before, astonished that we did not do this—long, long ago.