The leaping woman arrives in an ambulance of starlight. Take heed young warrior, wanderlust vagabond—these stars burn for only so long; they can fall and die en masse of clouded fire, its grip reaching for a death experienced together, not alone like everyone else. Make a wish, or this search will be your downfall; see there, light-years scrape across battered and bruised skies encased in flaming trails of golden chariots. They didn't race ahead, star-bright, to fall in vain. Once, only once in a lifetime, myths braced for the constellation of gods splattered among the cosmos. Oh, see it pass you by now. Adrift a torrent of wind and sea and deserted dust storms, that leaping woman bathed in starlight felt as if she was rusting as burnt and red as iron. She was no "holy city," so she looked to the moon and waited for its milky cradle, a boat in a rather black, brash sea—a sailor’s friend in Poseidon’s tidal pull. Waves of stars took its shot, they rose up and hit like a tsunami's sucker punch until she clung to the orbit of impermanence. Her family always told her about the principles of practice, but what did they do other than call her a kind of lazy susan, waiting for the heavens to guide her home. So she leapt and she fell, and she snagged and cracked with each broken branch, until she lay still, very still, most like those monastic monks, waiting for the brush of enlightenment and the tongue of its tempters beneath a tree and its grassy roots. She was on the roof of the world, her name known only as Ngari, the remains of a celebrated and ruined kingdom, a place for the rather vast and few. Magical, divine—a final state of nirvana—a place to pilgrimage and find what all those stars lost, alone "to fly high and never fall." No need for another emergency call, this was her final search for home.
