Dear Nobody ... somebody?

I know that I shouldn't be writing these letters after what happened yesterday but I can't help it. It's how I cope with everything and I can't take that away from myself. I just won't make the naïve mistake of actually sending them out into the mail. That takes away some of the meaning of the whole activity but it's sure better than not writing at all or sending them out to another address and praying that I didn't fuck it up again.

Now that that's cleared up, I need to decide what my next move is. Not only how to deal with Danni but also just how to deal with my day in general because I'm still lying in bed and I don't know what I should do next. Get up and shower? Just lay here and listen to my stereo all day? Hang out with my friends? Mope? There are plenty of things that I can use this day for because it's Sunday and I don't have work but I can't think of anything except for that stupid college kid who has read all of my letters. And I also can't stop thinking about all of the personal crap that I put in those letters. This stranger knows everything about Grey, about David, she knows about every secret that I've ever had in the past two years. Just thinking about it makes me feel sick to my stomach.

She wants to meet up with me again after I've digested all of this but I don't see how I can ever look this girl in the eye knowing that she knows all of this stuff about me. I think that maybe I'll call Grey over because I know that he wouldn't sleep with me last night which was actually kind of nice of him to be honest, but now that I'm not such an emotional wreck on the outside, I think that he'll go for it. I know that it's probably a bad idea to rely on Grey for a therapeutic release but it's either him or alcohol and I've seen what happens to people when they use alcohol to solve all of their problems and it gets very ugly very quickly. I don't want to be like that. Maybe sleeping with Grey like I am isn't much better but at least it's not something that I'd have to go to rehab for.

So it's decided. I will call Grey when I get out of bed. I still have no idea when that will be.

No picture this time.

Sincerely,
Luna Rose

I fold up the letter that I'd just written and I place it in an old shoe box before pushing it under my bed for safe keeping. I lay back down in my bed while I try to work up the courage to face the day but it's not working because I just feel too inside of myself today to even move.

Well, I did move enough to write that useless letter and now I'm moving enough to grab a half-smoked joint from my nightstand and the lighter next to it to get a little bit of marijuana into my system before I do anything today. Maybe that'll help me think of something else other than the college kid with all of my secrets.

It doesn't.

Just as I'm about to get out of my bed to call Grey, there's a knock on the front door downstairs that pounds so loud that I can hear it through my locked bedroom door. I wait a few moments to try and hear anybody else in the house getting up to get the door but eventually, I decide that Nathan and my mom are either not here or still sleeping so I go downstairs and open the door myself to see two of Nathan's friends standing there.

Without saying a word, I just step to the side and let them walk into the apartment and I close the door behind them.

"Where's Nathan?" One of them asks me and I start breathing through my mouth because they reek of stale cigarettes and rotten eggs. I don't know either one of their names but I recognize them from hanging out around the apartment with Nathan sometimes and they're always at the parties that he throws here. One of them is taller than me with greasy brown hair, always-reddened brown eyes, acne-ridden skin, and his clothes are so baggy that it looks like he just went on a fad diet, lost 100 pounds and still hasn't bought new clothes to fit his smaller body. The other guy is shorter than me with dark skin, dark eyes, he's almost bald with only a thin layer of wiry hair on top of his head, his clothes are still baggy but not as baggy as the other guy's.

"I don't know," I mumble, blowing smoke from between my lips as I walk back toward the stairs to go back up to my room.

"Hey, let me get a hit of that," The white boy tells me before I can get too far and I turn back around to look at him with raised eyebrows with the joint between my lips.

"Get your own."

"Come on, beautiful, don't be a bitch right now," He says and his friend lets out a rough laugh before sitting down on the lousy couch. "You have enough to share."

Blowing the smoke out again as if to rub it in his face that I have weed and he doesn't, I offer him one lasting glare before I head back to the stairs. "I'll let Nathan know that you're here."

Upstairs, I knock on Nathan's door a few times and then I open the door when he doesn't answer just to make sure that he isn't in there sleeping or ignoring my knocking. He's not in his room so I go back down the stairs to inform his two friends of this news.

"He isn't here," I say with a small yawn.

"Call him and tell him to get his ass over here," The short guy tells me with a demanding tone.

"I don't have his number."

"You don't have his number?" He wonders with suspicion. "Aren't you his sister?"

I just shrug at him and then head back upstairs. "We aren't exactly close."

Once I get back to my room, I know where I'm going to go. I have to get dressed first though so I get dressed wearing jeans, sneakers, a band t-shirt and then my winter coat. Grabbing my bag, I head back downstairs and realize that those two guys are still sitting on the couch in the living room even though I kind of figured that they would have left by now considering Nathan isn't here.

My room is locked so I don't really care if they're here though, so I just ignore them and leave the apartment to catch a bus toward the nicer part of the city. The northeast side where the middle class and chain restaurants go to thrive.

On the first bus that I take, I'm riding with a mother and her crying baby, two old ladies speaking rapid Spanish back and forth, and then one middle-aged man talking loudly on his cell phone using many financial terms. On the second bus, there's a few old men, some girls that look like they're too young to drive, and a little toddler with his parents.

Once the second bus lets me off on the stop that I'd been waiting for, I get off and make my way down the street to find the building that I'm looking for. I haven't been here in a while so I kind of forget where it is, I just know that it's down this road somewhere but it's a very distinct looking building so I know that I'll see it when it passes.

With my hands in my pockets to keep them warm, I walk with my sneakers padding along the cold sidewalk and I watch my breath turn into fog in front of my face. I pass an Apple Bees, a McDonald's, and a strip mall that contains a Walmart, Buffalo Wild Wings, an Asian buffet, a Game Stop, and what seems to be a local hair salon. I can see a Chuck E. Cheese in the distance but I don't pass it before I come across the sphere-shaped building that I've been looking for. The city's planetarium.

It's open to the public and free on Sundays so when I go through the front door, I'm welcomed by a very enthusiastic planetarium employee who is probably a grad student and after she greets me, she ushers me into the planetarium and tells me that the next show will start in half an hour.

I only have very vague memories of my father. Two distinct memories stand out to me whenever I think of the guy. One memory being of me, Nathan, and our dad going to fields outside of the city where there are a plethora of clovers and we'd spend hours out in the fields looking for four leaf clovers. I have no idea how he did it but my dad would always be able to spot those clovers almost instantly and it would drive me crazy. Whenever I found one of those four leaf clovers, Nathan had me convinced that to receive the luck from the clover, I had to eat it. And so being six years old and stupid, I did. Turns out, that wasn't true because I sure as hell didn't get any luck from digesting plants as a child.

The other memory is looking at the stars because he was a big fan of space, which makes it obvious that he got to name me because my name literally means 'moon'. He would point out all of the stars in the sky, all of the constellations and the dots in the sky that weren't actually stars but were other planets. He even had a telescope that we'd look through.

Anyway, because it's not nighttime and this city is hopelessly polluted and cloudy and also because it's too cold outside, I cannot go outside and look at the stars. The planetarium is a nice second best though. The circular room has rows of seats like a movie theater, only about ten of them being filled right now, but the ceiling makes it seem like we're sitting inside of a sphere with the whole top half of the room acting as a projector so that it looks like we're sitting under the night sky.

I sit down in one of the reclining chairs and I easily find Orion right above me.

I don't know why I find the planetarium so soothing but I don't think that it's just because of the fond memories I have from my childhood with my father and sometimes Nathan.

I look up into the planetarium's projected depiction of the night sky and I look at all of the stars. I think about how big they are compared to our tiny little planet, how far away they are, how big our universe must be. I think about stars colliding, galaxies being made, stars dying, being born, destroying other things in space. I think about how utterly meaningless my life is to the universe, to the world even.

If I jumped off of that building, these stars would still shine, collide, and die. The moon would still orbit the earth, which would still orbit the sun. The Milky Way Galaxy would still be running its way toward the Andromeda Galaxy, promising earth's doom in billions of years. The universe just wouldn't care if I was gone.

It's comforting to know that nothing that I do will matter to the universe, like the actions of an ant have no effect on how I live my life. Nobody outside of my side of the city will care about me whether I kill myself or if I sleep with my best friend. The rest of the city wouldn't care or the rest of the state, the country, the world, or anything else in the universe. Everything will still be just fine. The earth will still rotate and the moon will still bring in the tide.

So what if this Danni chick knows about my life? I sleep with Grey, I've slept with a lot of guys, I can't stand my mother and my brother is a drug dealing asshole. I'm terrified of the life that I'm living but I love my friends more than anything. I'm good at school, I like my job at the library.

Like an ant having an affair on his wife, the universe just does not care about my secrets.

It doesn't matter if people find out how truly terrified I am of this life or any of the other secrets I have because frankly, I do not matter in this world. I'm no Gandhi or Mother Theresa or Shakespeare- I won't even matter to the world, let alone the universe.

I know that some people find all of this too much to handle, knowing that their lives won't matter after they've died because we're so small compared to what else is out there. I don't though, I find it a comfort to know that no matter what happens to me, everything else will live on.

Feeling a lot better about my letter debacle with the college girl, I remain sitting back in my chair, watching the stars twinkle down on me as I try to find the other winter constellations. I find Jupiter inside of the Gemini constellation and his two dogs- Canis Major and Minor, which don't look like dogs at all but who am I to judge the Greeks' imagination?

I rest back on the chair for the whole half an hour before the show starts and then the grad student from the entrance of the planetarium enters the room with a small microphone clipped to her shirt. She greets the crowd in the dark room and then she starts pointing out all of the constellations and how to see the rest of the Milky Way in the sky.

I listen to her talk about space for a while but after she explains the Pluto debacle, I get bored as she drones on about sun flares so I decide that now that my mood has been lifted, I can leave the planetarium.

With one last look at the stars above me, I get out of my chair and leave the planetarium to maybe walk around this commercialized part of the road or I can just get on the bus again and go back home. I decide to walk around the street for a little while and pretend like I belong in this middle-class part of suburbia.

Just as I'm leaving the planetarium and walking toward the Walmart in the strip mall, my phone starts ringing. Pulling it out of my pocket, I see that it's Grey that's calling me so I push the green button and answer it.

"Hello?" I ask him.

"Hey, where are you?"

"I'm at home," I lie for absolutely no reason, it's just kind of an instinct to lie.

"No you aren't, I'm at your home," He catches me. "So where are you?"

"I'm out," I admit with a long sigh. "Why, is something going on?"

"No, not really. I was just coming to check up on you after what happened yesterday," He informs me as I cross the large and crowded parking lot between Walmart and me. "Can you get here anytime soon?"

"I'm actually feeling a lot better than I was yesterday, thanks," I say in all honesty. "I'm on my way home now but it'll still be a while before I get back."

"Why, where are you?" He wonders curiously.

"I'm just out on the town, running errands or whatever," I mumble, turning back around to get back to the sidewalk instead of going through the parking lot to get to the strip mall of stores. I'm not sure when the next bus will be here so I don't know how long it'll take for me to get back home. "Just wait there and I'll be back soon. Is anybody else there?"

"No. Why, do you want somebody else to be here?" He asks me slowly and I can hear him grin perversely over the phone, which is something that most people can't do, but it's a talent Grey possesses. "I can invite Clarke if you want."

"I didn't mean it like that," I sigh. "Just you is fine. I'm in a really good mood right now though, so I don't need your sympathy sex."

"You're in a good mood," Grey repeats curiously. "What happened between yesterday and right now?"

"Just thinking about shit and everything."

"Well what was messing you up in the first place?" He asks me. "Because you were seriously freaking all of us out yesterday but now you're just fine?"

"Yeah, it's nothing," I say with a shake of my head even though he obviously can't see me. "Well, no, it was something but I'm figuring it out so it's fine."

"By yourself?"

"Yes, Grey, by myself," I assure him. "Really, it's probably not much of a big deal. Anyway, I'm at the bus stop now so I'll be there soon. I'm pretty far away though so it still might take me a while."

"Okay," He sighs. "I'll wait for you because that's just how much I want to fuck you right now."

"That's the most romantic thing you've ever said to me," I mutter sarcastically. "I'll talk to you soon."

He laughs on the other end of the line, which kind of makes me smile, and then he says, "I'll talk to you soon, Luna."

I hang up my cell phone and put it in my pocket as I'm getting on the bus and I feel about ten thousand times better than I did yesterday just because I looked up at the stars and remembered where I stand in the universe.

I know I've said this before, but I think that I really believe it this time: Things are finally looking up for me.