Stray light

Stray light!

You breathe unchecked in the dim, buried memories of our brighter days. Days long past—days of childhood serenity, of innocence and teenage romance. Our seditious reserve in the never-ending struggle against darkness.

​

And Ileana’s and Orestes’ last hope.

​

They live in darkness, each in their own. Sometimes—though only rarely—a ray of light penetrates it, stirring an indistinct aura around them. But only briefly; it soon fades, and they are returned, blind, to the vast dark kingdom. To the sublime mercy of the king of darkness who rules there. Invincible, vicious, and mean.

​

One day he lost his temper, scowled, glowered, and admitted: “I don’t know when it appears. If I did, it wouldn’t—I’d blot it out too. I don’t know when that light will appear any more than you know why you ended up here.”

​

That is what he told Orestes one day, as he suffered and wondered where he had gone wrong, what mistake had cast him—blind—into this dark kingdom. And then the king, cruel and glum, determined to extinguish the faint hope born of his own confession, added:

​

“That light lasts but a fraction. Don’t get your hopes up. It lasts very little, and it’s called… it’s called… stray light.”

​

This myth is moulded around the fraction of time that strange light lasts. It culminates in the encounter of two vast, dark constellations—Ileana and Orestes—and in the tectonic collision between them. Their ascent upon the cross. Until they descend from it and finally behold the great light, following a course akin to Christ’s Resurrection.

Ileana was just a friend. I never met her in person; we only corresponded. She was tragically lost during her struggle for freedom and light.

​

I deliberately imagined this Ileana differently. Different only on the outside—which matters little, even if a rough sketch inevitably strikes the eye as shabby. At her core, I preserved the same passion the other one had. And I made her a winner, walking the crimson and luminous path of the sun.

​

Let her tell the other Ileana that,

if she ever runs into her.