Amina is holding hands with me. We are in the city. We are outside. We should not be holding hands here, not where prying eyes could see us. See us being so intimate. See us being so close. But I feel safe. We are here in the nighttime, and all the people are asleep. We are alone. Just her and me and the stars and moon above us.

The night sky is beautiful. The night sky is the one bit of beauty that we have in this dusty city.

The city is usually teeming. Teeming with bustling merchants selling their wares. Teeming with people buying all sorts of things. The people like us would be buying grains, the people who worked in the houses of the rich would be buying spices. The rich people themselves would be buying fine jewellery and other things. There would be people headed to and from work. There would be children trying to find a space to play in all the chaos.

But right now everything is quiet. Right now, everything is still. And right now I can be free with Amina, no pressure holding any of us down.

“It’s beautiful, getting to share this moment with you,” Amina whispers, head tilted up to watch the sky. I bring her hand up to my mouth to give it a kiss.

“If only I could give you all the beauty of the world. You don’t deserve this swarming city.”

“You give me yourself. And that is enough.” Her words are as soft as the night air all around us.

“But still. I hate this destiny we’re trapped in.”

“I do too. But when I’m with you I feel free.”

“Freedom. Do we even know what that is?”

“It’s the way that the moon shines in the sky, every night. A beacon, a guiding light, showing us everything that there could be.”

“You’re so poetic. You make everything beautiful. And … you help me, help us all, express everything that we have inside.”

“Thanks. You help me express everything inside me too. You help me understand everything inside me. You help me understand what I want. You help me understand I deserve more.”

“You deserve so much more,” I echo her, “and I don’t even know what more is sometimes. I don’t even know if there’s anything beyond all of this, beyond this need and this drudgery and this constant aching.”

“There’s the opposite side of it,” she tells me, “there’s the lives that the rich live. They have so much fun.”

“But I don’t want that either.”

“Me neither. It sounds just as bad, or maybe even worse, than what we live through.”

“But I want something. I don’t know what I want.”

“I know what I want,” she tells me. “I want you. And I want you to be happy. And I want you to know that you are loved beyond infinity.”

“I … I have no words. Thank you. You’re loved beyond infinity too. There’s no words for how I love you. It is beyond number, beyond size, beyond form. And I wish it was enough. I wish it was enough to save us.”

“It’s given me this moment and for now that’s all I need.”

“The stars are beautiful tonight.” I look up to the light and the darkness shining all around us. And I feel it pouring into my soul.

“They really are.” Her voice is hushed and reverent. Her eyes are awed and entranced. Her mouth is soft and unguarded. Like she has nothing to fear here. Like she has nothing to guard herself from here. And she doesn’t. Not with me. Not with the night sky. Not when it’s just the two of us.

“And the moon,” she whispers, softly to me, her voice flowing with the wind.

“What about the moon?” I ask her after a few seconds.

“She almost feels like, like she’s here with us, like she’s another person here with us, and she’s walking with us too.”

“She does, doesn’t she? But she’s not like a chaperone. She’s more like, like another lover.”

“That’s so true. Like she can hear all of our secrets but she’d keep them.”

“She does hear our secrets. Everything that I’m telling you, I’m telling you under the light of the moon. And she’s a party to all of them.”

“She’s so silent but she speaks so much despite her silence. Or maybe because of her silence. The way she communicates is so, so different from the way people communicate but it’s so similar all the same.”

“I think, all communication happens in silence.”

“What do you mean?”

“We speak. And we hear each other’s words. But what we focus on isn’t the words. What we focus on is how we feel, how the other person feels, and how we’re sharing our feelings together. And feelings cannot be translated into words or anything else, they can only be felt and shared.”

“That is so profound. You’re so right. I feel like, that’s one of the most profound yet most fundamental things of our lives. We live in feelings, and we communicate in feelings, and we express ourselves in feelings. And it’s how we connect to each other, and how we connect to the world.”

“It feels so right, walking under the sky with you.”

“Right. That’s exactly it. It feels right. If you know what I mean.”

“I think I do.”

She wraps her arm around my shoulder as we keep on walking.