GCC - Wish Upon a Star

Please Note: this is just a draft, layed down quickly to have it as an entry (before deadline) for February's Genre Creative Challenge contest. The story is more complex and will be developed and improved in a future post.

I believe in symmetry. It's in my people's genes the need for matching halves, and tonight's the night I'll find out if I'm to blow into sparkles, like they all say it happens.
Finding the right one to entrust your soul to isn't a child's game and it might even happen that one ends up as an eternal black whole, with irreversible effects for generations to come. So I was told.

I too got my heart broken and when that happened, I scratched myself a nice zigzag on the healthy half. My homemade tattoo vanished though, in less than it took my wings to grow another full feather. I looked horribly unbalanced with my chest half scratched and for a whole decade I hid inside my stormy cloud. I'd only come out of my sulky cocoon once every full moon to watch my parents hug into a perfect butterfly and fly. Towards homelands they said, skies it looked to me. They'd always come back tired and happy, a strange silvery dust glowing on their lips. For centuries, ever since I was able to comprehend uttered sounds and distinguish the different levels of fluttering, my mom and dad kept telling me stories about how they and their family moved here. Their parents' parents, along with their brothers and sisters found themselves one night falling rapidly towards these lands. What the stories say is that one giant glowing nucleus exploded then into hundreds of sparkling crumbs and then disappeared into the Infinite with a fading dusty trail. It's the same way me and my brothers were born, mom says. Well, more or less, she adds. And it's how my children will be born one day, she adds at times, and I catch dad's smile and a strange glittering in his eyes.

Their happiness helped me heal my first and only so far heartbreak. That and watching the humans' children staring through their windows at nights and blowing wishes into the skies. Strangely, there seem to be more of them the nights my parents have their honey trips, but I didn't bother at the time. They were nice to listen to, with all their whispers.

But tonight's my night and I'm as ready as I can ever be. Mom's been over the whole deal a few more times in the morning, trying to convince me it won't hurt at all, yet the mere notion of explosion brings shivers down my spine. It'll be like a warm and soothing light wrapping me and my loved one, growing larger and larger until it'll burst into little stars. We'll then be free to fly through the skies, like she and dad do. Sounds nice and all, as long as I've chosen my true other half. Otherwise...

Oh well, children will most probably whisper their wishes to me this time, that's enough of a thought to dust away my fears.