Everyone knew her name.
“I heard she can fashion stars out of shadows,” someone would say. And someone nearby, smug and giddily so, would retort, “Ah, but I heard she can stitch clouds into willows, and when the wind makes the willows weep, the clouds in the willow veins drip-drop into ponds. That’s why when you look into the water on days when the wind is gentler than your mother’s kiss, you can see clouds skimming its surface.”
She was a legend--a goddess whose magic melted through the mountains and seeped into the sand-stuck homes of those who surrendered to her stories. But even with all the prayers, all the festivals, all the cloud-gazing and feet-stomping and hands-clapping, she couldn’t help but feel… alone.
No one had seen her for years, but she’d always been there. She’d slid across sandalwood floors in socks the silver of her eyes. She’d swung her body to the rhythm of snakeskin drums and horse hair bows. She’d taken a child’s hand and touched it to her heart, begging for the boy to hear her, but he snatched his hand away and ran.
She’d been there, all those years, listening to the stories told about her and the way people dared to dream of meeting her. But when she waved, it was like she had disappeared. They looked right through her even when her life lingered on their tongues.
After ten years her heart curled up all feverish in her stomach and her cheeks hurt from trying so hard to smile, to crease into the tilt of her lips the words she wanted so badly to speak. But she never spoke. No one would hear her. She knew that. And when no one responded, her heart would tremble in her chest, carved hollow by the loneliness that speared first her words and then her body.
It was time to go home. Ten years and she could not shake off the way loneliness slumped her shoulders and whitened her hair. Before she left for the sky, she walked to her favorite pond, by the willow tree she once stitched from clouds. She dipped her toes into the water, watching it shiver at her touch. The clouds in the water startled. Why are you back? They wondered. Did you not want to live among these people who dreamt of your magic? Who promised to revere you like they did their own mothers?
She sighed. I was wrong. They only care for my magic. My glory. Not my humanity. Among them I was invisible.
Perhaps you should look up, the clouds urged. Towards the sky you used to call your home. So she did.
Crouched on a willow bark, the sky draping his silhouette in violet, the little boy she once held grinned at her. In one hand he clutched a kite so long it glanced the clouds in the water.
“Miss, will you fly this kite with me?”
