Neon and Moonwater

It is a story of becoming. Drop a line or two. Thanks!

The Drift

Mara had lived in the city for three years, long enough for the skyscrapers to feel like old companions and short enough that they still surprised her.

Every night after her shift at the café, she walked, not for exercise, not for escape, but because her feet insisted.

The streets shifted with mood: some evenings soft with dusk’s lavender hush, others sharp with the metallic bite of traffic.

She wandered anyway.

Through narrow alleys glossed with puddles, along brick walls blooming with graffiti, across bridges where the river glowed like spilled mercury.

Inside her, something mirrored the maze, dim-lit corridors, rooms she hadn’t dared open.

Her “demons” didn’t have claws; they lived in whispered self-doubt, old regrets, the weight of mistakes she carried like stones in her pockets.

Sometimes she imagined them cracking under her steps like thin glass, painful, but freeing.

She found small signs of kindness on her walks.
A street violinist playing with his eyes closed.
A woman folding cranes out of discarded receipts.
A bus driver who nodded at her every night like they shared a secret.
These strangers felt like sages, offering tiny wisdoms without ever speaking directly.

Even the streetlights seemed to watch her, tall, warm sentinels keeping silent vigil until she reached the riverwalk.
There she’d stop, hands curled around the cool railing, and breathe until the ache inside her softened.
She didn’t know it then, but she was walking toward an awakening long before she found the path.


The Encounter

She met him on a night when the sky hung low, swollen with the promise of rain.
He sat on the river’s retaining wall, sketching the skyline on the back of a pizza box.
Mara slowed, drawn by the bold, messy lines he carved with a charcoal stub.

“You see it differently,” she said before she could stop herself.

He looked up, eyes warm and startlingly present, like melted amber catching the last scraps of daylight.
And in that moment the city seemed to inhale; something subtle shifted around her ribs.

His name was Leon.
They talked until twilight turned to ink.
He wasn’t mystical or strange, just unfiltered, grounded.
Where Mara carried quiet storms, he carried a steady warmth that made her feel like she could finally exhale.

Being around him made the world less theatrical and more vivid.
Colors sharpened, graffiti glowed like molten glass, puddles mirrored neon like stained-glass windows.
Her heart, usually tight inside its bone cage, fluttered as though remembering an old skill: flight.

It wasn’t love yet.
It was the pulse of possibility.


The Spark

A week later, they climbed an abandoned water tower to watch a thunderstorm break over the city.
Wind tangled their hair.
Rain misted the air.
The horizon pulsed with electric veins.

When the lightning struck, the whole sky shuddered open.
Mara felt it reverberate through her chest, as if the storm were happening inside her as well.

Clouds ripped apart, revealing a patch of swirling stars behind them.
For a heartbeat, the city felt like a living nebula, expanding and contracting with cosmic breath.

“It’s like it’s waking up,” Leon murmured.

But Mara knew it wasn’t the city.
It was her.
Something ancient and bright cracked open within her, as though galaxies were ringing along her bloodstream.
Thoughts she’d buried unfurled, restless, gypsy-toned, vibrant.
She seemed to shed invisible wires she’d wrapped around her own spirit, threads snapping loose into the storm-dark air.

The moment was small and enormous at once.
A spark catches fire.



The Earthmother Moment

Not long after the storm, Leon took her to a forgotten park on the edge of town.
Tall trees arched overhead, their branches whispering secrets.
Wildflowers pushed up through patches of broken asphalt.
The air smelled of fresh rain and warm soil.

Mara knelt, pressing her palms to the earth.
The ground was damp and alive beneath her fingers, like the slow heartbeat of something ancient.
She inhaled deeply, earth, moss, distant river water, and felt an unexpected warmth move up her arms.

“Close your eyes,” Leon said softly.

When she did, she felt held, not by him, but by the world itself.
An almost physical embrace, fierce and gentle.
Her ego loosened, letting old burdens slip through the cracks.
The hunger she’d carried for years, hunger for worth, validation, meaning, evaporated like steam.

Fireflies blinked in the shadowed edges of the clearing, tiny cinders drifting upward.
A few danced near her face, reflecting in her eyes as though crowning her with flickering sparks.

For the first time, she felt rooted.
Not trapped, rooted.
Connected.




The Shattering Wholeness

The transformation wasn’t sudden.
It came like dawn, incremental, inevitable.

One morning she watched the sunrise spill over the skyline from a hill above the city.
Glass towers blazed gold, rooftops shimmered, the entire city looked baptized in fresh light.

And inside her, everything clicked.
Every shattered thought.
Every old fear.
Every question that chased her through sleepless nights.

They all settled into place, as if her soul assembled itself from scattered fragments.

There were no enemies left to outrun.
No imaginary wars to fight.
No desperate search for truth in broken books or borrowed ideas.

Her ideas of self, success, identity, all dissolved into something softer, wider, truer.

A deep, resonant purr rose within her, a hum of certainty.
Doubt bowed like wind-bent reeds before it.

She felt whole.



The Awakening

It happened the night of the full moon.
Her apartment’s rooftop was quiet, the air warm with early summer.
Mara stood barefoot on the concrete, the city humming beneath her.

The moon rose enormous and white-gold, luminous enough to cast shadows.
She felt its pull, not gentle like a tide but commanding, an ancient instruction remembered in her blood.

Her breath deepened.
A silver thread seemed to stretch from her ribs to the sky.
Energy shimmered through her limbs, bright and soft, like a forgotten language returning.

She whispered the truth she suddenly knew:

“Witches aren’t born. They awake.”

Memories, real or imagined, rushed through her:
A forest at night.
A circle of women.
Hands pressed to earth.
Light moving through bone.

Her cells felt like tiny constellations.
Her breath felt like prayer.
Gravity held her, but only just.

She realized she was clay and stardust, both earthbound, yet endlessly reaching upward.



The Becoming

From that night on, the city felt different.
Not smaller, more luminous.
Streetlights glowed like quiet guardians.
Wind whispered messages she didn’t quite understand but felt comforted by.
Every person on the street hummed with hidden energy.

Mara walked the city again, but the wandering was different now.
She wasn’t searching, she was witnessing.

She helped strangers without thinking.
She listened instead of waiting to speak.
She saw beauty in places she’d once ignored:
a cracked sidewalk filled with weeds,
a child spinning in a laundromat’s fluorescent light,
a cat balanced like royalty on a dumpster lid.

She felt herself rise, not above the world, but into it.
Into connection, into wholeness, into truth.

Leon remained by her side, not as a savior but as a companion, steady and real.
Together they watched the city breathe, change, grow.

And under the stretched-open cosmos, Mara stepped fully into who she was becoming
wild, free-spirited, enlightened, awake.

Not transformed into something new.
But finally, beautifully, completely herself.

@RaMa