The History of the Moon

In days of old, men looked up at the stars and felt an affinity that we have lost. In the age of candles, when women wore their hearts on their handkercheifs and men drew their souls into the maps of a flat earth, they saw the stars as if each one was right outside their front door. 

It was brighter back then, the moon cried. I remember, the light was thick, like butter. You had to slice your way through it just to get to the store, but even then, things were easier. We had a way of doing things, you see, because people would get lost in the light, so thick it was. If it happened to you, you would just have to wait where you were, humming a ditty until someone passed you. It was easy to tell when someone was lost, because the light would turn a different colour around them, sometimes it was blueish, like the veins underneath a thin person's skin. Other times is would turn a pink colour, and you knew you would have to be extra careful with these people, they were the sort who always proclaimed that they never got lost, and it was their embarrassment which changed the colour of the light. When you rescued them out, you would pretend that you knew them, or else they had dropped something further back, and you were merely trying to return it to them. They would smile graciously and move carefully onward. But so thick was the light that this was a common occurrence, if you were careful and knew which ways to go to miss all the thick spots, you could still pass three, four, five people, stuck in the light as you walked down the street.

I used to get lost all the time in the light. It happened so often, I am quite a daydreamer you see, that the light around me began to turn silver whenever I'd become buried in it. My aunt, who seemed to know a lot about the light and how it worked (she was a scientist, and always had some new opinion on the matter, or some new fact they had figured out about it) said that light seemed to move differently around me. Something about my gravity (because we all have gravity, she would say, almost incredulously to my mother when she'd say something counter-factuitive), how I somehow managed to pull this light to me in such a different way to anyone else.

We know now that light moved slower back then, but to us, it seemed the most normal thing on earth. We didn't know any better. The light had been this way in our parents time, and in their parents time and in their parents time, and we supposed that that was just the way things were. The stars were made that way, and that was they way they would stay until they die, if they ever do die, which as my father said, could barely happen in our day, so there's no use thinking about it. But the light didn't stay the same. I remember the day it began to change, I felt it that morning. It was almost as if people found it easier to walk places. I still got stuck, as did many others, but there seemed to be less... friction. Like it wasn't so much of a struggle to find our way through the light. People supposed we were finally getting used to the way things were, but somehow, I felt that it was different this time.

That evening, my aunt bustled in on us in a right state,

'The light' she puffed and panted, 'the light'.

'What about the light?' I asked. I was the only one who really cared. The rest of our family had accepted that things were the way they were and there was no use in trying to understand them, it was all too much and there were more important things to worry about, like the state of the refrigerator or the whiteness of socks.

'The light. It's beginning to move faster.' She announced as she finished the drink I had handed her.

The world became silent to me in that moment. I wanted to ask her what that would mean, but I felt too foolish. Deep inside, though, I felt like a part of my insides were fading away, like tomorrow I'd wake up without a heart or a lung or a kidney and there was nothing I could do about it. My aunt knew though, and she answered me in a whisper.

'It means that things are going to change. We think that a day will come when people won't feel the light as we do.' She hushed my look of panic, 'It's not as bad as you think, there will still be light. But we will be the last to feel the universe like this. It's expanding, you see. And one day, the light will be so far off that it will take years, maybe even hundreds, thousands of years to come back to us.'

I began to notice how things were changing. It was still only in small increments, nothing really happened to cause alarm, I mean to say, nothing to cause everyone else to wonder at the state of things. They never even wondered when the air became thinner, not caused a stir when the seas began to rise. I've heard people say now that the tides began to change because of the nearness of the moon, but it happened completely different. The oceans sent me up there, one evening.

I say it was evening, although there wasn't really any difference. I only call it that because I have become so accustomed to the movement of the earth, the rhythm of its night and day that I have even superimposed it onto my memory. I was out in the water, swimming, when the tides began to rise higher and higher. I would have gotten out of the water, but I had unfortunately become entangled with one of the last remaining patches of thick light, and all I could see was silver. It wasn't the most unpleasant sensation at all, in fact, it was rather lovely, swaying up and down with the rise and fall of the waves, humming to myself a little rhyme my aunt had taught me about the times before colour, surrounded by silver when suddenly, I was propelled upwards, out of the water and into a strange elliptical orbit. At the time I didn't know it was elliptical, or even an orbit at all, I was still surrounded by my patch of light, and oblivious to what was happening. After a while I began to think how I should really be going home now, just in case my family should find me gone and begin to fret. By now, late in the series of events, I had started to notice that something was different. Instead of having to fight my way out of the thick light, I found that my skin had begun to absorb it. Instead of slipping off my skin, it was seeping in, causing my hands and feet and face and all other parts of me to glow with an eerie phosphorous shine. And after that, oh! what a surprise I had to find that I was soaring through the air. And not just any old air, this was new. Fresh, and sort of... thin. And after a lifetime of light as thick as butter, this air was quite refreshing. I felt as if I had been suffocating, I wondered how I managed to live like that for so long, breathing in all that light, it's a wonder my lungs could have even handled it!

And somehow, in the surprise of finding myself in this new air, and admiring my new, glowing appearance, I never did wonder why I was soaring through the air. It seemed almost natural, and I didn't feel in any way that this was something I should stop. 

At first I was very close to the earth. I remember bumping my knees on the tops of mountains and getting lost amongst gatherings of new clouds, but after a while I began to get used to my orbit, and braver too. Soon I pushed my way through the atmosphere, because even that was coming to be quite stuffy, and found myself in the orbit you see me in today. 

My aunt has always come to visit. She was the first moon landing, I believe you could say, although it wasn't so much a giant leap for mankind as a fond aunt coming around to tell me of the newest scientific discoveries, and to keep me updated with her new success at being the worlds leading expert on the moon. And so here I stay, the last remnant of the days where light was as thick as butter, before the world changed, and before the oceans sent me here.