“I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days ~ three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
~ John Keats, 1819 in a love letter to Fanny Brawne ~
January 12, Year 2037
~ Zaziwe’s letter of love ~
My dearest Hizkiah,
Your letter. Your flesh. It arrived! Finally. I hold this precious piece of paper that has traveled past the stars here in my hand as I write. I am unable to let go of it. Unlike the paper, the ink has vanished though. All of it! Would you like to know where it has gone? It eroded away when the light of my own stars touched yours. The solid became liquid and slipped into me. I sipped and swallowed all the spaces where your fingers have traveled.
Downward now your words are spiraling where they are breaking down into smaller units and releasing their energy to form an entirely new star system within me. My spirit infected by your wonders, your words. Peaks of eternal light. Injections of oxygen and gravity. My peace. The letter, the finest layers of your flesh, and the seventh element that makes up my own human body. So if you are missing your hand with it’s 27 bones, it is here inside mine in a power grip of tactile movements.
Oh Kiah, I am billions of years away from earth, more so now that I hold your letter. Incredible how light is being created on the dark side of the moon! Such inconceivable discoveries in new necks of the solar system. But do tell me how to walk here on this planet when your moon life is so immeasurably far removed from it? An alien now in my own atmosphere. A moon rock not on the moon but alone here on earth. I fell upward and then down into the void between moving stars of a foreign field. No here, there, before, or after. Life lost in uncharted spaces where earth life is unable to reach me. Nebula now. A particle of the Pillars of Creation. Humans still see me because of the limited speed of light, but I no longer exist. I am thousands and thousands of light years away waiting to disappear into nothing.
It is your gift to discover the secret of the stars and powers on other planets.
But I can no longer stop wondering why you continue to stay wired to sustain the human race outside of it’s own planet. Why, when it means separation from the greatest forces of love and life here back home on earth for indefinitely.
If our species will cease to exist like any other species would cease to exist then let it loose its form, and perhaps it will find its way to continue in another one. Why must humankind continue as we have known it? Why do they think our safety is guaranteed on mars or the moon? Extend our life out where when our species is unable to protect and tend to the life-trees and earth’s expanding wonders and powers right here? If not on our own planet then surely we will not be able to sustain a life of liberty, beauty, and sanity outside of it. This lunar mission, I know where it will end. They are not remapping the moon. They are remapping you. They are remapping me.
I miss you. 
My love for you is greater than love, so how can I not long for you in all my hours? You are not a man whom I love. You are love in the form of a man. There is a difference. Abundance. Eros longing for Eros in an entirely new planetary system.
My love for you travels beyond my planets, beyond their dreams. All great poets of the earth were right. Earth, a necropolis without agape and eros. The world not a world without love.
I had a dream. It lasted three days and my last three full nights. We traveled back in time. You were Keats and I was Fanny Brawne. When flesh touched flesh we transformed into butterflies. And then we vanished into meigetsu seifu ~ clear moon, cool breeze some 7000 light years from earth into the portals of life.
I write to you from a specular sphere reflecting uncharted colours in all kinds of cosmic directions. Because my love for you is greater than love, I look at the solar system and see you ~ butterflies everywhere.
~ your Zaziwe
Naomi, I have long said that you write poetry with your prose. This is so much the spirit here–poetically conceived and executed, a series of linked metaphors that tell the story. You have the Romantic spirit of a Holderlin, whose poetic epistolary novel ‘Hyperion’ extols Love and Beauty, yet you are not reviving Greek myths but fashioning modern myths that yet feel timeless. A sci-fi/fantasy epistolary prose poem (!!) about a lunar traveler or colonist, and his bereft love on Earth, who now feels like a lone survivor on the planet, a castaway in the universe.
Your two images add so much meaning and beauty. The figure of Zaziwe is half cocooned, both emerging from the chrysalis and encasing her human self in the butterfly form. She is ready to bridge the impossibility of space and join her love Hizkiah in flight together. In the second image, she has emerged to look back on the infinities with an interior eye. As human and butterfly, the difference in species interposes as big a barrier as the millions of miles to the lunar base or the light-years in her imagination. But the divide is no impediment. She contemplates the memory of her own butterfly form, and his, and their imagined meeting in love, which can take place anywhere, everywhere she looks.
~lucy
Lucy, you are so generous here again with your words. They are a gift and I thank you for taking the time to share all of them! And I have just added Holderlin’s ‘Hyperion’ to my reading list. I will make sure to read the work of this Romantic spirit.
~Naomi