I stare up at the sky and wonder – when did the stars go out for me?
This western sky stretches from horizon to horizon, unmarred by a single cloud or silhouette. Five years ago – even a year ago – I would have looked into the heavens and marvelled at the pinpoints of light scattered in the darkness. I could have pointed out the constellations while you pretended that they were unfamiliar to you, asking questions and pressing for deeper answers. I don't know why you did that. I never got away with anything else around you, but that one thing... That tiny thing – letting me ramble on and on about ancient cultures and creation myths and finding comfort in familiar images in unfamiliar lands, letting me be the teacher to your willing student – you always let me have that.
How did I not notice that you did that until it was gone? Until you were gone? Or was I the one who left?
I don't see the stars now; I see the vast emptiness between them. The darkness spreads across the sky like (a cancer) a blanket, blotting out the tiny sparks of light. Some corner of my brain still measures distances between the stars I can't see, marvels at the incredible amount of energy necessary for travel between them.
It's habit more than anything else now, I think. Years of contemplating the mysteries of life beyond our world, our galaxy – trying to reconcile the things that I (we) witnessed – have worn permanent grooves into my memory. They make it easier – following the old patterns rather than carving out new ones.
I wonder if these memory-grooves look like the path that connects us, even now. Just a slightest grinding down of life and differences and boundaries between our bodies until, one day, that which connected us was so clearly defined that I couldn't believe it hadn't been there all along.
Maybe it was always there. Maybe it, like the stars above, was overwhelmed by what surrounded it and I didn't pay close enough attention. I never did pay close enough attention, did I?
Always, my gaze was turned to the sky, around the next corner, into the past, the future, the dark. Fleeting glimpses danced at the corners – a flash of red, of blue, a slash of lipstick, a glint of light off a cold metal blade – but it was (you were) never enough to catch my eye.
---
You stand in the middle of a barren field, face turned up toward the heavens. Your eyes are open but you don't see the stars. You don't trace the familiar constellations as they march across the sky.
You get lost in the spaces between the stars.
It used to be so different. You would point out the Herdsman, your finger moving from Arcturus to Nekkar to Seginus as you told of celestial migrations and meddling gods. You breathed ancient words into life, painted vibrant pictures in the cold grey night, showed a glimpse of what you might have been had things been different. Had you been different.
You lived for that, didn't you? And you didn't even know it until you were gone.
You still wonder. Could you ever really stop? You stare into the darkness until it bleeds into your eyes, blacking out the light and the present.
The past is there in that black expanse. Can you see it? The colors and the shapes and the light that lives in that cold, black sky?
You can't see the stars but you can still see between. You see the space that divided us, ebbing and shifting with each day that passed until it disappeared.
Maybe you see me clearly for the first time now that there is nothing else to catch your eye.
