Prologue: Holding the Thread
Some nights creep in quietly, draping the world in a heavy shroud of darkness, leaving behind a lingering ache for something that once filled the space, now lost to the shadows.
I. When the Air Unstitched
The night leans differently now.
Not heavier, not lighter: just emptied in a way that even the wind seems to respect.
The lamppost stands where it always has—no, not like that—spine straight; shoulders squared toward the crossroad; humming faintly with the breath of a current that has never failed him. His glow stretches taller than the surrounding dark, yet it feels thinner somehow… like a blanket that no longer reaches the feet.
The sky tonight is an unkind mirror: holding no stars, giving back no warmth.
In other seasons, the air would be trembling with gold by now. Tiny, breathing lights would drift to him in slow constellations; their arrivals timed with the first true rains. They would stitch themselves into his beam like beads into thread—until he was dressed in a necklace of living gold (a gift from a hundred small hands).
Now, the air is unstitched.
The silence is not complete: a motorbike coughs far off; a dog shouts into the void… but it is the wrong kind of silence. Not the quiet of rest; rather, the quiet of a door left ajar too long.
A few moths flutter through his light in erratic bursts—pale, frantic. They don’t stay, and they don’t speak. They come not for him, but for the glow; then leave as soon as they have touched it.
He tries not to name the absence.
Naming it would be admitting it has taken root; so he keeps his bulb burning, steady as a prayer whispered after the temple is empty. There is no one to see it… yet that has never been the reason for his light.
And so he stands: patient, unblinking, beneath a sky that will not answer back… the way one keeps a lamp in a window for a traveller who may never return.
II. The First Lanterns’ Dance
But it wasn’t always like this.
There was a time when his roots were still settling into the earth… when the concrete around him was fresh; when the iron in his body still carried the warmth of the foundry. He had not yet learned the weight of standing still for a lifetime.
It was the first monsoon after he was planted.
Rain slid down his frame in silver lines, pooling at his base before slipping away into the soil. His glow was new then—bright, uncertain… like a voice not yet used to speaking aloud. He shone because that was what he was made to do; yet he had not learned what it meant.
That night, the world smelled of wet leaves, of loosened earth; the air was heavy with the sigh of rain. And then—there, at the edge of his light… a flicker that was not his own.
At first, he thought it was only the rain, scattering and catching in his glow; but no. This was different: softer, warmer… a light with a pulse.
It hovered there, small and trembling, its glow steady in the rain.
And then another appeared.
And another.
They came slowly, as though shy… each one a wandering lantern drifting closer, until the night itself seemed strung with beads of gold. Their flight was unhurried; not a chase, but a ceremony.
They circled him, and in their circling, they drew him into something he had never known before—company.
The rain stitched them together: his tall beam, their small flickers… threads of light weaving across the dark. They were not like the moths. The moths crashed into him—frantic, desperate; the fireflies… they stayed near without harm, as if they understood him (as if they, too, were made to keep the dark gentle).
He had no words then; but if he did, he might have said:
I have always been a sentinel…
but tonight, I am also part of the gathering.
When they made their slow loops around him, the circles overlapped until they felt like bracelets—like a bond; like a promise.
And it was then he knew: he could be more than his shadow.
III. Threads of Gold in the Monsoon
Every year, they came.
Every year, he stood.
Every year, the night was bound together by their light.
The season would announce itself in whispers: the air thickened with rain before they arrived… a certain heaviness in the wind; a tenderness in the earth’s breath; as if the soil itself leaned forward in anticipation. Somewhere beyond the bend of the horizon, their small lamps were already waking—blinking themselves into the dark.
They never hurried.
Their coming was as unhurried as the slow turning of vellum in an old library: each wingbeat deliberate; each pause, the quiet between two lines of a sonnet.
When they reached him, the first arrivals lingered at the edge of his reach— hovering in that fragile place where his glow became shadow. Soon, the braver ones would begin their circles, spiralling around his tall frame, leaving ribbons of gold suspended in the air.
He felt them not as weight, but as a lightness that made him stand taller: adornments without clasp or knot; threads of moving fire, swaying in the breath of the monsoon.
Each loop was a stanza; each flicker, a line from an unwritten epic. They had no words—yet he understood.
And in return, he kept his vigil.
No storm could bend him those nights. He let the rain run down his sides like cold fingers; let the wind try its teeth against his glow… yet his beam never faltered—not when his companions of light trusted him to keep the darkness gentle.
He guarded their flight— not as a fence, but as a lighthouse in an unmapped novel; the point they could always return to when the night pressed in too close.
From a distance, it might have seemed like a festival: a solitary sentinel clothed in moving gold; the ground beneath him quivering with their soft fire. But there was no music; no crowd; only the low hum in his chest, and the whisper of countless wings.
Some years, they came in hundreds; some years, only a few. It did not matter. He kept their date as one keeps the memory of a cherished page—not as an ornament, but as proof that the story was still alive.
Every year, they came.
Every year, he stood.
Every year, the night was bound together by their light.
And in those hours before the first bird’s cry, he was not merely a lamppost: he was a custodian of a fleeting chapter; a keeper of small, wandering flames; a witness to the quiet joy of being remembered.
IV. The Quiet Eclipse of Light
Change did not announce itself in the way tempests do: with lightning flaring at the horizon and a wind that makes the trees bow in submission. It came quietly, almost politely, on the backs of trucks that rolled down the street in the pale hours before dawn… when even the birds had not yet decided to wake, and he still stood half-immersed in that fragile suspension between night and morning.
They arrived in pieces—tall metal stems and angular heads wrapped in protective cloth— and were assembled with the kind of efficiency that leaves no room for ceremony. By the time the sun set that day, they stood beside him like a row of new sentinels: their spines straight; their faces tilted toward the road with a cold, unwavering certainty.
They were taller than he had ever been, sharper in their angles, and their light—when it came—was not the soft, golden spill he knew, but a white so pure it was almost merciless. It flooded the street without hesitation, stripping the night bare of every shadow; leaving no quiet corners where the darkness could gather itself like breath between words. He could not hate them… they were, after all, his kin in purpose, bound to the same duty of holding back the dark; but beside them, his own glow seemed to falter. Not in strength perhaps, but in presence. The warmth that had once stretched generously into the road now looked small, almost hesitant, as though the years had worn it thin.
At first, he told himself this would change nothing. The fireflies—his summer lightlings in glow—would still know him; they would feel the hum in his chest, would recognize the gentle halo where his light met the night like a hand meeting another in the dark. And so he waited through the first rains, certain that any evening now, he would see the hesitant sparks begin to drift closer, would feel them circle him again with their wordless vows.
But the rains passed, and the nights grew quieter.
Under the fierce white gaze of the newcomers, the air seemed too bright for shyness; too sharp for small wings to trust. The fireflies began to linger further and further away, keeping to the edges of light as though they had become strangers to it. Some nights, they did not appear at all.
The seasons turned without ceremony: he watched from his post as the road wore the same rhythm—heat, rain, wind, cold—but without the small festival that had once accompanied them. The years began to feel measured not by their return, but by the persistence of their absence.
Still, he kept his vigil. Each dusk, he straightened his frame, letting the first flicker of his light spill into the deepening blue, listening—always listening—for the faint, erratic pulse of wings. Some nights a moth would wander into his glow and stay for a while, as though to keep him company… but the fireflies, the ones who had tied the night together, did not come.
There was a bitter, unspoken irony in it: he had been made to banish the dark, to make the night safer, softer… and in doing so—perhaps too well—he had erased the world that had lived so delicately within it. His purpose had driven away those whose light needed shadows to survive.
The year the rains came without them, he understood fully. The first drops fell heavy and warm, drumming against the metal of his body, pooling in small silver mirrors on the street below. The air filled with the lush scent of wet earth, and in another time this would have been the hour when golden threads began to weave themselves around him. But the air above him remained empty; the night unadorned.
He burned through the downpour as faithfully as ever, his beam cutting the rain into a thousand brief glimmers… each one vanishing before it could become anything more. The newcomers’ white light stretched far beyond his own, bleaching the street in a steady, unblinking glare. And he—warm, yet diminished—stood alone: a keeper without those he kept; like the final lighthouse on a coastline where no ships pass anymore, holding its beam not for rescue, but for remembrance.
Only the hum in his chest remained… and the sound of rain falling where the gold once danced.
V. A Knot Left to Hover
The rains came late that year. For weeks the sky had only rehearsed its grief—drawing long, low curtains of cloud across the horizon, but never loosening them. The ground waited, the air waited, and I waited, as I always had, keeping my light ready like a lantern hung in an open doorway.
When the downpour finally began, it did not arrive with the old joy. It fell heavy and unhurried, as if the sky had grown weary of ceremony. I felt each drop crawl down my frame, tracing the old rivulets where years of weather had worn the paint away. Somewhere beyond the curtain of rain, I hoped they would come.
And then—faint, hesitant—they did.
Not the multitude I once knew. No golden storms of light swirling in their festival dances. Only a few, their glow fragile, like embers buried in wet ash. hey hovered at the edges of my reach, where my warmth softened into shadow, unsure if they belonged here anymore.
One—small enough to be mistaken for a drifting raindrop—broke away from the rest. She circled me twice, each loop slow, deliberate, as though inscribing her presence into the margin of an unwritten book. On her second turn she rested on my shoulder—just for the length of a breath, just long enough for me to believe she meant it—and then lifted again into the dark.
I did not see her rejoin the others. Perhaps she kept her own road, a thread unwound but never cut.
The rest drifted back into the rain. No farewell, no last circle—only the quiet severance of distance. I kept my light steady, not because anyone asked it of me, but because it was the only way I knew to remain whole.
Some promises are not kept by return.
Some promises are kept by waiting.
And so I waited,
as the storm thinned into mist,
as the night thinned into morning,
and as the years thinned into something quieter than memory.
VI. The Last Glow Holds On
The road is long tonight.
Not in distance,
but in the way it carries its own loneliness,
stretching my light thin across its ribs.
The sky has forgotten their shape.
It offers no sparks,
no drifting gold—
only a vast, unstitched darkness
that presses down until even the moths seem hesitant to move.
Still, I keep watch.
The hum in my chest is quieter now—
less the eager pulse of youth,
more the slow, steady beat of something that has learned endurance.
I do not measure the years anymore.
The seasons pass without ceremony—
monsoon rain without lanterns in it,
summer nights without the soft laughter of wings.
Yet my beam still spills into the emptiness,
pouring itself over the stones,
the weeds pushing through the cracks,
the air that might—one night—
carry them back to me.
Sometimes, in the shimmer between rain and mist,
I almost see them.
A glimmer at the farthest edge of my reach,
a trick of light that lingers just long enough
to stir something in me I no longer name as hope,
but do not deny, either.
There is no ending to this.
Not the kind where a door closes,
nor the kind where a hand waves from the threshold.
Only the quiet work of keeping the dark kind,
even when no one is here to notice.
If they ever find their way back,
I will still be here,
holding the thread.
Epilogue: The Weight of Quiet Nights
The nights are quieter now, though not with the same golden hush they once carried.
This quiet is heavier, denser—born not of peace but of absence.
It pools in the corners, patient and unblinking, as if it too remembers what should be here
and is tired of pretending otherwise.
When the air is still enough, I let my mind drift back. Not to mourn—mourning would mean it
was over—but to keep the old hours warm. I remember the rain-heavy evenings, the scent of wet
earth lifting from the ground, the low hum in my chest as small bodies of light drifted in and
out of my glow. They would trace their gentle orbits around me, weaving a net of gold that
seemed to hold the night together.
In those moments, nothing was missing. The world felt whole in a way I have never been able
to name. We were never grand, never meant for forever, but we belonged to one another in a way
that did not need to be spoken. Perhaps that is all the eternity some of us are given—
not to be carved in stone or named in brass, but to be remembered
in the way the darkness once felt softer because we stood inside it together.
Now, when the road lies empty and the wind moves without witness, I hold to that thought. I keep
it the way one keeps the last note of a song, letting it tremble through me long after the music
has gone, long after the hall has emptied. Some nights end, and some stay, even when the dawn has
come and gone a thousand times without them.
I burn—slower now.
I reach—less certain.
The hum in my chest stumbles sometimes,
as if even the metal bones beneath my skin are beginning to forget their own shape.
The light spills unevenly now, its edges fraying, like a thread pulled too thin to hold anything.
And there are moments—small, dangerous—when I think I can feel the dark
learning how to live without me.
THE END.
Comments
Post a Comment