Asterisk*

Luminescence and Liaison*

*For both the light and the dull of the day

I let my eyes wander into the depths of your heart,

And I've never regretted it once.

Because the laughter,

Love,

And the sense of infinity I've felt there,

Is something I can't find anywhere else.

Marcus

It all started with one spark. One single strand of light, one tiny little boom, a flicker and a flame that burns out within minutes. A tiny little yellow light that would change how the rest of us lived forever. It changed how we saw life, changed how we worked, changed how we used our money, and most of all, changed who was at the top of the game.

I imagine a lab, with a dozen different materials scattered around. Somewhere in the corner, in the bottom of all of the other useless materials, is tungsten, waiting for filaments to be made out of it. It's trial and error. It takes years to take something with only a flicker and make it into a flame. Long lasting. Easy to use. Affordable. Everything had to be prepared for the grand reveal, the one switch flicked and the new life started, a hundred bulbs lit up for everyone to see. Love lit up for everyone to see.

It's a battle, really. Whether it be Edison vs. Tesla, the struggle to keep going, or the sheer emotion that your mind doesn't want you to feel, but your heart does. It's impossible to protect your heart and your mind at the same time. Instead, you have to trust that the other person will protect it for you, and that's fucking scary. Too scary. But not that scary that it's impossible. At the end of the day, I could make this happen. The lightbulb could light up, even if I wasn't the one to do it. Apollo was.

He was careful about it too, never once flipping the switch and calling it a day, but tiptoeing around what he knew would hurt and making it come out in such a way that I couldn't be mad at him or myself. He knew which lights to flip and which to keep shut off, somehow having a crazy intuition for knowing how to take words and make them something more. They say actions are louder than words, but talking is an action. In fact, I'd rather hear words because saying them to my face; that takes courage that I didn't know I don't know if I would ever have in me.

Half of the time, I'm surprised that words actually come out of my mouth when I'm Apollo. My first instinct was just to pause and stare because every time I looked at him, it seemed like there was something new waiting for its story to happen, waiting for someone to say something. So then, I would speak. Pretty surprising, really.

It's interesting that we have a periodic table of elements, but not a periodic table of feelings. Sometimes I wonder what the first feeling anyone felt was. It had to be happy or sad, just because they were so prominent in everyone's life. It was the first two feelings you learned. I hope it was happiness because to be completely honest, there was just too much sadness in everyone's life that I wish I could erase. Including Apollo's. But I can't, so I just sit and try my best to act like white out, giving a temporary but visible solution to what had stained the page.

I was currently walking down the halls to get to Apollo's dorm room. I studied the tiles on the floor, trying to avoid stepping on the grout like I would do with my brother when we were kids. I went into the room and waved hello, making Apollo look up from his phone screen. We were just going to watch a bunch of old horror movies that we had rounded up the other day. I wasn't a big fan of horror movies, just because I didn't find them interesting. I feel like with horror movies, people hate them or love them, but I personally just wasn't affected by the things on screen. I knew Apollo was really into them though, especially the older ones. Never thought that would be what he liked to watch, but it's cool. I'd be down to watch a video of someone repeating the word 'cat' over and over again, just as long as Apollo was with me. He could make anything seem ten times more interesting than it actually was.