4. Welcome to Universe H (An Alternate ending, a sadder song)

(From out of the darkness, bells toll) 

I knew you once, sweet girl / Eyes big and wide in the dark. 

Yeah, I knew you. 

Hair twisted up in wonky braids / Scar under your left eyebrow.

I write your name out in morse code, messages blinking in the vast / going nowhere. 

Welcome to Universe H. 

Here, I live on a farm (like you do) // Big apple trees and crop rows 

Chickens in the yard / wind through willow breath like riversong 

Here, everything is different // The sun shines warm and sweet and gold 

And when night comes we let it stay dark.  

The other day, I had sat in the kitchen / Skin warm in the midday light. 

I had been all right. All right like you had never known.

And even when the sun had faded, I remained with a halo of gold. 

Universe H, here is all right. 

Though, sometimes, in the quiet hours of night / When the fields are still deep and vast and black. 

The gold light around me settles sleepy, leaving bare a pinpoint of blue. 

Blinking like a radio tower in the fog // Warning light. 

On nights like these, I am unable to sleep. 

So the painted steps of the porch creak and whine / Under bare feet / When I steal away,

Wandering far into the blanket of stars / Alone at the wheel of my flying saucer.

Visiting farms just like mine, watching from afar. 

The channels on the cosmic television are infinite.

Iterations are sweet when you don’t have to live through them. 

I came across you, on a night like this. 

Your whole universe had shone that blue / the same blue I had found under all the gold.

Saturated / I couldn’t stay away

And when my feet had settled into your alien soil, far out in the crop field, I had known it before (or parallel). 

I’d sit in your blue scorched night / Fluorescence stuck needy on my skin

Face turned up to your false sun / As the crickets chirped away / Nightsong and me.

Eventually, you began seeing me,

Eyes narrowed and suspicious as they peeked out from behind linen curtains. 

A little girl, feet too small in her shoes / kodak in hand / trying to prove I was there.

I must have scared you.

I guess after a bit, I came to see you instead. 

It seemed that all the blue that leeched into the land / spread off until this place became nothingness

Started at you. 

I don’t think you knew that. 

But yeah, I knew you. 

A sad little girl / left lonely in the gap between the mountains.

You tried so hard to know me / to escape me.

I’m sorry / I must have scared you / I couldn’t stay away. 

Did you build that church / light that cross? 

Or was it put there to taunt you? 

Built out of fear and anger. 

One night you were gone / Drove off in a truck you could hardly reach the gas pedals in. 

I watched as this world went dark without you. 

Row after row of crop lights 

/ Clanking as they shut off. 

I tried coming back / but you were never home / gone off, stayed far.  

So my spaceship collected dust / I stayed in bed. 

Watched as the blue light rose up, settled, content / In the space above me

Lay awake and / I wondered about you / if you had grown, changed. 

Where you might have ended up 

Holed up in motels / lost in grass fields / alone on an ending beach, boardwalk rotten under your boots. 

The possibilities were infinite, really. 

It didn’t matter, though / If you were different,

If you had done everything right or everything wrong. 

If you had ever ended up praying. 

What pain / goodness you collected. 

If you became nothing or everything or remained just a little girl. 

That blue light would be yours to carry.

And in quiet nights like these,

You would feel it, rise up above you. 

And remind you it was there.  

Blinking in the dark.