Fallen stars

It's dark as I walk across campus. It grew dark while we talked, rain speckling the black windowpanes.

It's been a dull wet month, curtains of homourless mist cloaking the view of distant mountains, slicing up the mornings into solitary visions of an unpeopled universe, trees crying fat raindrops in the unearthly empty quiet.

Outside has become a place to hurry through, collar turned up against the cold. Winter has claimed it. It is a dead place now, even the burnt reds and terracotta of autumn leaves dulled, blackened by rain. Dark sky above, emptied of stars.

I was half running, skipping every few steps, to meet someone.

And in the glow of the streetlamps, the first frost glittered on the ground. I stopped, delighted. In the deserted square of a darkened campus, a girl on her own, smiling at a secret.

One hundred thousand fallen stars, scattered at my feet.