Per aspera ad astra

Tonight's Midnight Stories is a work of fiction. Enjoy!

When Neil was a little boy, they began to appear on his arms one by one.

At first his parents thought they were birthmarks. But when they started to take shape like the koi fish swimming upstream on his right shoulder, why, they realized that what they thought to be birthmarks were really tattoos!

But these just sprung up on his arms detail by minute detail as he grew up. A petal later became a full lotus flower. Another, a cherry blossom.

On his left arm, an eye filled out to include scales then the snout of a dragon, bordered by a maple leaf and, slowly, ink dot by ink dot, a young samurai riding a fish.

And, peering from the swirls of color or wind bars, one of those masks from Japanese theater they call a hannya, cradled by sea spray, clouds, flowers, leaves and bubbles.

His parents did not know what to make of it and eventually dismissed it as some form of genetical anomaly. Somewhere in their combined bloodline must have been an East Asian ancestor. For how else can one explain what was happening to their firstborn?

Once he hit adolescence, the tattoos stopped forming, but by then both his arms were covered with them.

Neil read up on Oriental tattoos and found out the one on his arm was a three-toed Japanese dragon. According to legend, these dragons came to Japan from China, rising from the water with their serpentine bodies covered by koi scales, breathing clouds that brought both fire and rain and losing two of their toes during the journey.

Neil felt a strange affinity with the wingless creature and had dim memories of emerging above the surface of a river. Swimming upstream but never past a point called the Dragon’s Gate.

He would sometimes wake at night crawling on his belly on the floor after dreaming of gates he never quite built up the courage to cross and a beautiful maiden betrayed because theirs was a love that could never be.

Were they dreams, or remnants of a past life that he was remembering?

He examined his arms and saw the lotus flower. Somehow he knew that in this other life he had to overcome the temptations of the flesh after falling in love with a woman who was already promised to another.

The daughter of a samurai, she was betrothed as a girl to a young valiant of the bushi clan, but as she grew up, she longed to marry only for love.

They met, fell in love and planned on running away together. But in the time of cherry blossoms, he realized he could never give her the life she was accustomed to. He decided not to show up at their arranged time and place.

When she realized he was not coming for her, the rejected bride commited suicide. In his rage upon discovering what had happened, her samurai father slew the man she loved.

She turned into the lotus flower. He, the dragon, rising to the sky until his benevolence is rewarded by rebirth in the form of a maple leaf, and although their love ended in tragedy in the past, the universe worked to bring them back together in this lifetime.

Neil now saw the tattoos as portals to create the tableau that would bring the past back to life.

One by one the ink dots left his arms to materialize as the man he was and the woman he loved.

And all that was left of Neil on his bed when they came looking for him later were indentions on his pillow and pools of tattoo ink in various shades.

For like the old stories go, love will always find a way to reach the stars even through great hardship and the distance of the years. Per aspera ad astra. — BM, GMA News