Come away, O human child!
to the waters and the wild
with a faery, hand in hand,
for the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand...

--William Butler Yeats

A young man woke up abruptly late one night from a restless sleep. He sat up in bed, suddenly alert, and quickly decided that falling back asleep would be next to impossible. So, standing up, he walked to his bedroom window, and, pushing the brown curtains aside, he looked outside. The sky was a deep serene blue, dotted with specks of stars, and pale white moonlight glowed from behind a cluster of gray clouds.

He breathed in deeply, admiring the silence of the sleeping night, then exhaled and decided to go outside. His room seemed so stuffy and closed in comparison to the still night outside his window.

He groped around the floor in the dark, searching for a pair of pants. He pulled them on hastily, then threw on a pair of shoes and walked over to the door to his room cautiously. He listened luckily there were two different snores coming from his parents` bedroom.

Carefully, he tiptoed down the stairs. He knew that there was one stair that creaked when stepped on, but he couldn’t remember if it was the third or fourth stair. He took a chance and skipped over the fourth. When he stepped on the third, it creaked loudly. He winced and glanced towards his parents’ room worriedly.

After a moment or so, he tiptoed down the rest of the stairs and unlocked the front door, and slipped out, closing the door behind him gently.

There. He was out. He felt a strange thrill as he walked down his driveway to the road. The cool night air was fresh in his lungs, and the moon cast everything in an eerie white light.

Once he reached the road he turned left and started walking with no destination in mind. He passed dark houses and silent trees, and the only sound he heard was the small sound of his sneakers hitting the pavement as he walked.

The further he got, though, the louder the slapping from his sneakers became to his ears. The thrill he felt from the silent night rose with the noise of his shoes. Finally it seemed so loud that he felt almost frenzied, with his heart beating faster and his chest tightening in a panicking feeling.

He broke into a run without realizing it, and still the slapping noise followed him until he was sprinting and almost at the point of covering his ears. He ran all the way to the bridge, but then stopped abruptly right before the road turned into the bridge. The noise was gone, and he laughed at himself for acting so strangely. His heart still pounded, though.

Suddenly something white caught his attention from the corner of his eye. He looked, and saw to his surprise a girl standing on the bridge, looking down over the edge to the deep ravine below.

She hadn’t noticed him, or else she ignored him. He stared. The moonlight reflected off of her white dress until she seemed to be glowing as much as the moon above her. Long, pale hair tumbled down her back in careless waves, and a few strands danced idly in the slight breeze.

As he watched, she stepped up onto the edge shakily and stood for a moment, looking down.

"It’s so far," he heard her whisper. Her words fluttered over to him in the starlight and broke his mesmerized stare.

She shook a little more, and looked as if she might lose her balance and tumble down into the ravine at any second. He was filled with a sudden understanding, and cried in a hoarse voice, "Don’t jump!"

She jumped off the ledge back on the bridge, startled, and whirled around to face him. Her lips were dark, her nose fine and straight, and her eyes were filled with a mixture of starlight and fear.

When she seemed to realize that he was just a boy her age, she said shakily, "I wasn’t going to." Then she frowned slightly and added, "I couldn’t decide if I wanted to -- I was just looking."

The young man tried to think of something to say back to her. He felt foolish for having said anything, but her white dress flowed around her legs gently in the breeze, and her starry eyes seemed to wait anxiously for his reply.

Finally he said, "You shouldn’t. Jump, I mean. It’s a horrible thing to do."

She smiled gently, then asked suddenly, "Do you think the Renaissance painters actually believed in the beautiful angels they were painting?"

He shook his head, taken aback. "I-I don’t know what you mean. I mean, I don’t know what a Renaissance painting looks like."

"Oh, I’m sure you do, you just don’t know what they’re called," she replied carelessly. "Anyway, I was just thinking about that as I was standing on the edge. Was their faith as pure and true as the angels in the painting?" The girl in the white dress shrugged at his blank reaction, and turned back to look down the edge again.

He remembered then a painting his mother had shown him once in an art museum when he was little, with angels like those the girl had spoken of. "I think-" he said hesitatingly. She made him think of poetry.

She turned back to him and looked at him with her questioning eyes.

"-that they got their inspiration not so much from faith but from an appreciation of the idealistic beauty they saw in other people," he finished hurriedly, as he looked upon this frail, but strong beautiful creature bathed in moonlight before him.

She smiled and he blushed and regretted having said that immediately. Those eyes seemed to understand perfectly that he was thinking of her, and he was afraid.

She took a step towards him, away from the edge, and searched his eyes for something. Then she hesitated and stopped, and he read her eyes to say, "I’m afraid, too," although she actually said, "Oh."

There was a pause. His mind was filled suddenly with a line from something he had read in ninth grade English class, and not even knowing why or what it was, he said, " ‘Oh, speak again, bright angel.’ "

She stared, and suddenly her dark mysterious eyes filled with tears. "Romeo and Juliet," she whispered. "I have it all memorized."

Then they both smiled shyly at each other and stepped towards each other. He took her hand, and together they turned and walked off of the bridge feeling suddenly complete.