once upon a falling star

She stares up. The twilight sky is in its final phase of turning deep indigo, the dark blue complementing the barely visible white clouds.

Then with a startling realization, she takes in the scene. From her vantage point, she could see the darkening sky, the moon with its fuzzy edges and a star, just one. The five apartment blocks forms a perfectly symmetrical pentagon. Lights are turned on in most units, the people needing to depend on artificial man-made illumination to attend to their daily chores, or rather at this point of time, watching the idiot box. Having home-cooked dinner.

A gigantic palm tree leaf at 9 o’clock, and if she strains her eyes to the left corner, she could almost see another palm tree.

She could hear nothing. Well, if the deep gurgling of the water of the whole swimming pool, devoid of anyone else, and the occasional sound of the cracking of her toes that vibrates throughout the whole pool means nothing. She stares up. The moon was still in its original position, the sky in the same variant of blueish indigo. Or indigo blue.

She thinks about how lucky she is. That nobody out of around 260 home units, each housing around an average of 5 persons, would choose to come down to the pool at that particular day, hour, minute. That at such a beautiful hour, she has the whole entire pool to herself, able to lie backwards in the water without any children’s shouts to vibrate the water surface, to try avoid ‘hitting’ anyone while she is swimming on her back.

She sighs to think how unlucky they were.

She stares up at the scene again, wishing with all her heart that she has, at that particular moment - a wide-lens waterproof camera to capture that particular view that nobody else in the world (she is very very sure) is looking at. Or maybe even, had looked at? As she had surmised before, no particular situation can be exactly replicated. You might try all your best to arrange the same physical items in its original place, but the emotions just wouldn’t be the same.

Out of a sudden, without a warning, something happened. It took just a few seconds, but then Mummy lets go of little Adelaide’s hand and all it takes is just a few seconds when she runs into the street and gets knocked over. People fall in love at first sight, in a few seconds. Mr. Right says the wrong thing, and turns into Mr. Absolutely Wrong in a few seconds.

All it takes is just a few seconds. No more second chances.

From 11 o’clock, she sees something bright moving towards 5 o’clock. She almost falls over from the water (if it was possible); is that a shooting star??

Ok calm down, it might just be a plane. She isn’t wearing her contacts, therefore she could only scrunch her eyes and strain to see what exactly it was. No such luck, she could only see that it was quite large, and moving very fast. She has never seen a plane move that fast before, usually it was just a tiny speck that moved, well, slow.

Not taking any chances, she closed her eyes and made a wish.

Okay, so she did not close her eyes, but she did make a wish anyway; that the world would be a better place, and she would not hate it anymore than she does now.

She watches the star/plane disappear at the roof of apartment block C. She then returns her gaze to the original scene. It was still the same, the position of the moon, the one star, the colour of the sky.

Image Source: Shooting Star or Skyscraper?

It was nice to know that some things stay the same, even when sometimes a beautiful something will go in and out of your life in just a flash. A few seconds is all there is, therefore she has learnt to appreciate a long time ago.