There was a man when the world was quite young. There was a woman. Sometimes it seems like all the stories start like this. Sometimes they do. But this time youth was no mere trick of light, sunrise filtering through the blinds just so to illuminate the room as she entered, because the world really was young once. I forget that. Do you? Before cities sprouted on the hills or smeared themselves across the riverbanks in a haze of steel and smoke.

Though there was smoke that night, whispering into the half-dark sky as night began to fall.

The man’s name has been forgotten. The woman’s. This is not to be considered. The world was young, and they lived in a succession of passing moments. Had not yet worried that such things as names might last.

The man builds up the campfire. Darkness gathers. There is no moon tonight, there are no stars. They’ve gone a distance away from the others, inadvisable on the savanna, but neither of them had to insist. One wandered off and then the other, and now their kinfolks’ singing is scattered across the near horizon, as the darkness presses down upon all things.

She speaks and he responds. He speaks and she smiles. Turns away as the full weight of night begins to settle. The fire leaps between them, casting shadows on her face and shoulders, the play of sinews in her thighs. We would say that she is sixteen, and he is nineteen, and there are circles torn beneath her eyes from waking late at night to the laughing sounds of the hyenas, a distant roar of lions, thunder, lightning, monsoons. Her black skin is calloused, laced by scars in intricate, intentional designs, and by an uncaring rake of claws received the year before from some predator or another, be it beast or bird or man. Her hair is no liquid tumble, no fast water at night. It does not spill across her shoulders. She’s hacked it short with a stone knife. Used the same knife just yesterday to skin his kill.

The man builds up the campfire. His axe and spear are close at hand. He has killed; mostly recently another man, when they passed a group of grizzled, half-mad wanderers on a hunt at the beginning of the season. Night brings those thoughts out in him, leaves him with a vague feeling of disquiet that often takes some hours to dispel. Not tonight. Tonight he is wasting wood to push back against the darkness for other reasons. He builds the fire up again, and she looks at him, at the night, with a curious expression, because she doesn’t understand what it is he sees.

Here is what he sees across the dancing flames:

Beauty, softened by the play of shadows, a blackness that breathes another meaning into night. Whimsy, ease, daring. She didn’t have to come with him. She did. They are too far from the others, these things are not safe. This was a time before we courted danger, before risks became exciting, and yet that thought stirs within him the most curious feeling. Building up the fire, the man sees the impulse that will, one day, lead to sprawling cities, hilltop fortresses, temples, tombs, and poetry. He does not yet have these. Is a part of their beginning, nothing more.

What he does have, staring at her, wishing that this moment could last, that dawn would hold off just this one night with its hunts and raids and headlong flights—

Is the stars.

He glances up, just a glance, he cannot bring himself to look away from her. He does not speak or gesture. Could not yet put this thought into words. He simply wishes in this moment when everything is youth and fire, that the two of them could be preserved. Or her. He’d settle for just her. His knees have begun hurting lately, and in the rainy season the old wounds along his hip and back ache. He’s turned half to dust already, but her.

He smiles, thinking that. She notices. Asks him what’s so funny.

“Nothing at all,” says the man, who goes back to tinkering with the fire, playing tender shadows across her bruised, calloused, scarred—supple—skin, before a passing breath across the world fades them into hazy memory.

There was a man when the world was quite young. There was woman. Sometimes it seems like all the stories start like this. Many have, and will, and do.

Lay back tonight. Find a patch of grass if you are able, away from all the lights. Listen to the gentling pulse of your heartbeat as the sun falls and darkness gathers. Watch, in astonished silence, as an infinity of campfires spreads across the sky. If you are very quick, or very daring, or very much at ease, perhaps you’ll see it—theirs, the first—before you blink the night away, and call them simply stars.

Lay back tonight, as they did.

There was a man. There was a woman.

Stories start like this.

r/TurningtoWords