I remember the night I fell in love with the moon.

I was walking home across Pyrmont Bridge, with a warm wind whipping my clothes around me. The Strokes were singing about this being it, somewhere smack-bang in the middle of my head.

I don’t remember why, but I was grinning so much my cheeks hurt, skipping, dancing, jumping up on benches and swinging around lamp posts.

There was magic in the air.

You know what I mean, when it’s like electricity, like an expectancy? You can feel it on your skin, a tingle caused by more than the physical world around you. You can see rainbows where there shouldn’t be rainbows and you realise they are everywhere, hiding in the corners, shining on every surface.

The air crackles.

You know the nights I mean, right? When you become aware of something else at work, just out of sight, just beyond your own consciousness, as subtle as a feather dancing on the breeze and yet so brutally obvious it’s easy to look straight past it, like a scar on a child's face.

There I am, spinning around on the bridge, just basking in the beauty of the Sydney skyline, when suddenly she is there, poking her head out from behind a cloud.

Only tonight it is not her. Tonight, it is him.

I’ve always thought of the moon as a lady, a woman. But not tonight. Tonight, he is a man. His golden face appearing, breaking free of the clouds that vainly try to hold him.

And he is smiling.

I’m just standing there, stopped dead in my tracks in the middle of the bridge, warm wind still pulling at my clothes and I’m staring up into this huge golden face hanging in the sky. I stand for an eternity, gazing, gawking at this handsome, smiling being. And he looks back at me and for a moment (a lifetime?) our eyes are locked and then he throws me a wink.

I remember laughing nervously. I remember looking around to see if anyone else had seen, but no one was looking, no one was paying us any attention.

I looked back, but the spell had been broken and once again it was just the moon, handsome and golden still, but no longer looking my way.

I laughed once again, loud and joyful and true. Then I planted my feet, and I threw back my head and right there, in the middle of Darling Harbour, I howled to the moon.

“Awooooooooooooo!!”

Then people noticed me. Then they paid me attention. I nodded to them. If I had been wearing a hat, I would have tipped it in their direction.

I smiled, and I danced all the way home. I may even have howled again, but perhaps not with the same gusto as I had when I stood in the middle of Pyrmont Bridge.

I told my friends about the moon and our moment of passion and how he had thrown me a wink, but they just laughed and told me I was as crazy as they had always known I was. And I laughed with them, for it was true.

I’ve looked for him again, my celestial love, but night after night it is her who rides the evening sky, her who wraps herself in a mantle of clouds and stars and she pays me no attention, though of course, it is not her attention I seek.

I know one night, when the conditions are just right, when the magic hides just out of reach and the warm wind blows. Then my prince will return to the sky and he will gaze upon me as I gaze upon him. 

He will throw me a wink and I will know love is true.