Big Stars

"When I Look at the Television...I want to see me, staring right back at me."
-Adam Duritz.
"Mr. Jones"

She tastes like a burning footlight. If gold could be a flavor, he mused, surely she would taste that way; like metal forged in copper heat.

He stares into her eyes when he makes love to her. The expression she wears is trusting, and yet a opaque concealment, like a cloud woven of fantastic dreams she cannot tell him about. The overhead light shines like stars in her pupils.

Is she high-maintenance? In a word, yes. She cannot live without an overnight bag filled with an innumerable number of ointments and decorations. She goes to sleep in eyeliner, in the happenstance that some lurid murder happens in the room next-door and she needs to appear on TV in her Nick and Nora Pajamas.

And it doesn't irritate him in the least that she loves to sit near freezing-cold windows, on freezing-cold decks, in the hope that someone will recognize her. It doesn't bother him that on their one night in Hollywood, she had them thrown out of the Roxy when she slipped a headshot under the door of a stall to a very vexed Mary-Kate Olsen.

Most of the time, she's very present in the immediate world of flight schedules and promos, promises and poses. But then the world shifts, a hot, unchecked word splits the cool sky, and she slips away, under a cover of mauve stars and a olive-green sky.

Now, he does judge rashly. Her dreams are clearer than his ever were, and perhaps they could be fulfilled with a twist of the waist and a bounce of a lock. Her maybes could mean the world to his future.

But he gives her the room to live in a world of black marabou and White Diamonds. Dreams were light and fragile, like the skull of a newborn baby.

And he must cradle her to keep the stars from burning her to flecks of cinder and ash.

The End