The moon and lies...

There’s a fascination about the moon, at least I find it fascinating, but you should never look at her for too long, she can hurt with her cold beauty.

I don’t know why the moon should be a woman, it just seems to have always been that way; but she drags me in, captures, drives me mad; could turn me quite lunatic if I wasn’t careful. She’s had so many names; Aega, Allison, Arianrhod, Bendis, Candi, Chanh-O, Diana, Ems, Hekate, Isis, Juna, Luna, Sadarnuna – the Sumerian goddess of the new moon.

I could stare at her all night. Yes, I know I shouldn’t, but I’m already a little lunatic in its gentlest form - foolish; eccentric; perhaps a little crazy. I see every shade of grey in the moonlight, the truth and many lies. I search for truth in the chaos of the night, looking between the lies to glimpse moonbeams of truth.

There, I told you I was a lunatic. I shouldn’t stare so much.

As a boy, I remember my grandmother coming into my room on nights when the moon was very bright, making sure that the curtains were drawn tight against the light.

She’d tell me that if the moon shone on my face as I lay in my bed that I’d die inside of a year. It was her gypsy blood I think, drawn up like the tides to the surface as the moon shone full.

I let it happen once, opening the curtains wide so that the bright full moon flooded onto my face as I lay in my green candlewick-spreaded bed. I left them open for over an hour, allowing my skin to bathe in the cold white light, absorbing the death rays that I imagined that light must contain.

My head was full of science fiction movies; ‘Forbidden Planet’, ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’, ‘It Came From Outer Space’, ‘Invasion Of The Body Snatchers’. It seemed perfectly reasonable to my nine year old mind that the light of the moon might kill you if you were exposed to it for too long. In my mind my gypsy blooded grandmother’s tale was metamorphosed into fact by way of a scientific explanation gleaned from American ‘B’ movies watched at the picture house on North Street every Saturday morning.

For a year I waited to die, and when I didn’t felt a tiny twinge of disappointment.

How silly we are as children, how gullible. How could I think that by allowing the light of the moon to shine on my face that I could die?

They say that if you stand in the moonlight of the full moon for long enough, wishing hard and concentrating on what you would become, that you can change yourself into anything you choose.

But then the same ‘they’ say that if you look between the lies you’ll find the truth.

Maybe I’ll become a cat.