Goodnight from Outer Space

Each night when I get lonely, hung in the heavens and my kin so far away, I watch the specks of desperate life on their march of aimless wander. It used to be they spoke to me, their knees and face abreast with wailing eyes. Now it’s only lunatics who call me. Searchers for knowledge, lovers at night, and lonely men. Looking to their sky to see me blinking, and I’ve never ceased to watch them. I watch the way they rise and move, painting tiny streaks of feeling on a tired little page of chaff. My light reflecting off salted faces, before bending back to my space-borne eyes their stories long since over. When they still dreamed about me, I would sometimes learn their names. But now I’ve learned to love them nameless, as if by turning towards each other they’ve magnified their size. Tonight - while billions of them turn in dance - it’s the waltz of one which holds my eye.

A solitary figure in crabgrass field who still half believes in stars. Like the sharpened blades pressing at her back. An endless realm of fogged up night, my light cast down in timeless blinking. If I were a million light years closer, I still doubt I’d hear a sound louder than the rushing frost tipped wind around her. Does she think her universe is ending? From here her earth still looks the same. Unchanged in geologic narrative, a plot of entropy that’s not yet half begun. That will end the same way one day I will: a cataclysmic nebula for someone else’s eyes.

My partner of the heavens asks: how can you stand the tedium? They prefer the ones who dance in brightest colors: movers and shakers who pound small feet to dust beneath them with arced fouettés in strokes of pain. I have no answer other than that I prefer the calm. The ones who ask for nothing. We are not gods, though our size once fooled them, we can not alter the writers pen. Some nights I press my eyes hard shut then open, in hopes that in a million years they’ll see that I was here. Watching with no answer.

A second dream appears, walking up behind my subject. He’s come to join her - be a place to rest her shame. How can one not stand this tedium? This plot of turnless pace? There is beauty in the stillness. Of two small dots at wordless war. Their silence pierces through the cosmos and wraps around each-others minds. A conflict with no resolution, they are both just waiting for the other to decide. To reach behind and hold the other, bring them close without words said. Their earth will one day die without them, but their story summits here. Two interstellar fighting lovers, laying spent in grassy bed.

I try hard to imagine how this touch of God must feel. To hold the infinite in your mind and lend it to another. Be seen and heard and touched and hated. Picked back up with a loving grasp that does not mind the smell of death. All I’ll know until I fade are the aging stars around me, too far to hold me in their orbit, too large care for what’s inside.

Tonight I’ll dream I walked among them, blinked through life and became dust. Do they even know, I wonder, that us stars too look out in space and gaze. I’ve circled in this universe at least ten million years, and it’s never been more beautiful than now.