It is 11pm and I am sitting on a bench at Elm Park, still sweating from the run I just took, and I am staring at the sky.
I cannot see the stars. Light pollution does that. It sits between you and the sky like a wall you never agreed to and just takes something away quietly, without asking. But I keep staring anyway. Because just because I cannot see them does not mean they are not there. And somewhere in that thought, somewhere between the sweat drying on my shirt and the sound of the park settling into night, I pulled out my notes and wrote this down before I lost it.
Staring into the abyss
hoping you will be there
just because I cannot see
does not rule out your existence
question is, will you stare back
And then I just sat there with it for a while.
I started thinking about the moon. How much attention it gets. Every poem ever written, every song, every person who has ever stepped outside at night has looked at the moon first. It is the first thing you look for. It is the thing everyone points at when they want to say something romantic or deep or meaningful. And I get it, I do, it is right there. You cannot miss it.
But the moon is not doing anything original. It is borrowing light from the sun and wearing it like it came up with the idea. Like it earned it somehow. And we write love letters to it. We call it beautiful. We use it as the biggest metaphor we have for the people we love most.
And meanwhile the stars are just sitting there. Burning. Quietly, consistently, on their own terms. Not borrowed light. Not reflected. Something that comes entirely from within. Something they were always going to do whether anyone was watching or not, whether anyone was pointing at them or not, whether the sky was clear or washed out by a city that forgot to look up.
And I started thinking about her.
I do not have a face for her. I do not have a name or a voice or a memory attached to her. Just a feeling. The shape of someone. The feeling of a person who has her own light. Not someone who learned to shine by standing next to someone bright. Not someone who only glows when the conditions are right and people are paying attention. Someone who burns from somewhere real and deep and entirely her own. The kind of person you have to actually look for because she is not standing in the obvious place asking for your attention. She is just there. Doing it. Being it. Whether you notice or not.
If the moon is out here collecting all this praise for borrowed light, then someone like her, someone who makes her own, how could I not stare. How could anyone look at the moon and then find out stars exist and still choose the moon. It does not make sense to me sitting here at 11pm with sweat still on my forehead and the whole park to myself.
The only problem is I do not know where she is. I am not even sure she knows I am sitting here thinking about her. I am just imagining a person who might fit the shape of all of this. Someone who exists the way stars exist. Certainly, quietly, completely, even when you cannot see them through all the noise and the light and the distance.
And that is where the question came from. The one I could not shake.
What if I could rewrite the stars? Not the song. Not the feeling the song gives you when you are seventeen and think you understand what it means. The actual thing. What if I sat here on this bench, still catching my breath, still damp from a run I took because I had too much in my head, and I just rewrote it. Moved things. Found her in the coordinates somehow. Wrote a path between where I am and wherever she is, even if she is on the other side of a sky I cannot fully see right now.
Will my stars allow it? That is what I kept asking the abyss. Will they tell me it is even possible? Will they shift something quietly, without announcement, the way they have always done everything, and just make it happen?
The sky did not answer. It stayed exactly as it was. Orange from the light pollution, hiding everything behind it, indifferent to the man on the bench asking it questions it was not designed to answer.
But here is the thing I keep coming back to. The thing I wrote down first, before anything else.
Just because I cannot see them does not rule out their existence.
She is out there somewhere. Making her own light. Not for me, not yet, maybe not ever in the way I am imagining right now. But burning. On her own terms. In whatever part of the sky I have not learned to look at yet.
And I am still staring.
Because maybe that is all you can do sometimes. You sit on a bench at 11pm, still sweating, still breathing hard, and you stare into the abyss and you hope that somewhere on the other side of all that darkness and distance and light pollution, something is staring back.
Question is, will she.
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