It Can't Rain All the Time by LunaFlower

(Disclaimed: quotes from the movie 'The Crow'; 'The Little Prince' written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery)

Little things used to mean so much to Darren -- I thought they were kind of trivial. Believe me nothing is trivial.

I would give anything now to walk through the door and see the table laid up properly, proper cutlery, proper crockery, a crisp white tablecloth instead of its current state of being littered with half-eaten, day old takeaway containers, more than one, I'm ashamed to say, having become a receptacle for my smoked-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives cigarette butts.

Or to have fresh flowers in the bedroom. I've seen so many flowers over the last few days that at the moment I can't bear to glance upon another but Darren always made sure there were flowers in our room. Their colour and variety changing with the seasons, daffodils in the spring, later came carnations and tulips and so it went on through to chrysanthemums and finally holly and hawthorn in the winter. On special occasions, birthdays and anniversaries there were roses. Yellow roses, white roses, pink, and once a year, on our 'day-I-asked-him-to-move-in-with-me' anniversary, red roses. They were always of the deepest hue of red he could find, so dark they appeared almost black. I guess it appealed to the vampire fanatic in him. Blood red roses for his love.

Like I said little things but to him they were important.

I'm standing at the window gazing at, though not really seeing, the rain splattered pavement three stories below, the rain has eased off to a cold, damp drizzle but the candles that have been lit at the entrance to our building have long since fizzled out. Now they have become tiny white islands in the miasma of soggy paper that once held letters and poems, the rain has caused most of the words that were so sorrowfully inscribed upon them to run and smear but the gesture remains. I think I am meant to be touched by it all, I'm sure I would have been had I not been so numb, so empty, dead from the inside.

Briefly the storm clouds part and the stars shine through.

I remember a story Darren once told me, a story that he remembered from his childhood. He used to tell it to our nieces and nephews.

A little prince came to Earth from a faraway planet. He ended up in the desert where he met a pilot to whom he explained a great many things about how the world should be viewed and how, with our mis-placed sense of what it means to be a grown-up, we often don't.

I think this part of the story appealed to Darren, how we are so often caught up in our daily lives that we confuse what is important with what isn't.

'There is beauty in concrete if you just look for it.' He used to say. And he was right.

Eventually the time came for the little prince to leave and naturally the pilot was sad at the thought of losing his new-found friend but the prince told him that all he had to do was to look out at the stars and on one of them there he would be, laughing. 'You -- only you -- will have stars that can laugh!' 

I brought Darren a star once. Which he promptly named Daniel Jones as he said I was his star. Sometimes Darren had a streak of corn that ran right through him like lettering through a stick of rock.

I turn my face to the inky night sky.

Are you up there right now, sitting on your very own star laughing, willing me to laugh with you, laugh over some little thing?

'Daniel?' I've been so lost in my thoughts I havent heard my mum let herself in. She comes over to where I am standing and her reflection joins mine in the window, 'What are you looking at?' She asks quietly.

'The stars.'

She smiles.

'They are laughing.'

'I know my darling.'

'Do you think...?'

'Yes.'

I return her smile.

It can't rain all the time.

If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn. People die. But real love lives forever.