Sojourn
an excerpt

My eyes searched the sky, hoping to find something, anything, to restore my wanderlust. It was a cloud-filled sky with but patches of starry skies that acted like pools in the clouds. The moon would float through one patch and then dive beneath the clouds again. Not uniformly thick, the reflective light from the moon would wink from behind the cloud cover. It was during one of the moon’s appearances that I saw the sign. The craters on the moons, not to mention the clouds themselves, were like nature’s Rorschach Tests. It was in one of these natural inkblots that I drew the courage to go on.
It was a face. Not the face, but one nonetheless. It was laughing. It was tilted back on a blob of a neck with its mouth opened impossibly wide. It was one of those unbridled belly-laughs, the kind that explode out from your chest with little warning and even less chance to control. Its eyes were scrunched tight and a white stripe among the shadows of the face looked like a tear streaming down the face.
Just as I took in the last detail, the moon was washed behind another cloud and the face was gone. That made me sad. I wanted, I ached, to see it again. It had been so long since I’d seen a face like that. Then it hit me; I couldn’t remember the last time that face belonged to me. When was the last time, my mouth was the very picture of mirth? When was the lat time that I laughed so hard that tears poured down my cheeks? I couldn’t even venture a guess.