I remember the night we named the stars.
We lay beneath the vast black glass of the heavens, tracing silver trails through celestial veils, inventing stories for distant worlds that neither of us would ever see.
You laughed when I confused planets for stars, and I laughed when you insisted that every constellation looked like a different animal depending on the hour.
We were young enough to believe that forever was a promise rather than a guess.
Now I stand alone beneath that same expanse.
The stars remain.
The moon remains.
The patient planets continue their endless circuits through the dark.
Yet everything feels wrong.
The sky is unchanged, but the light has lost its might.
The glow has lost its show.
The wonder has gone under.
I search for you in every constellation.
I find you in Orionās belt and in the pale light of Venus.
I find you in the cometās tail and the meteorās trail.
I find you in every brilliant thing that crosses the night, yet each sight only reminds me that memory is not company.
Reflection is not affection.
Remembrance is not presence.
The cruellest truth is that the universe never noticed your departure.
Galaxies still flower beyond sight.
Nebulae still shimmer and glimmer.
New stars ignite with radiant light whilst ancient suns collapse into silence.
The cosmos carries on its endless song, and not a single planet falters in its orbit because your hand is no longer resting in mine.
I used to think heartbreak would arrive like a supernova.
I imagined some grand collapse, some brilliant catastrophe of fire and desire.
Instead it came quietly.
A slow decay.
A drifting away.
A star losing heat so gradually that it scarcely notices its own defeat.
Every day since you left has felt like travelling through empty space.
There is no sound.
No ground.
No destination to be found.
Only distance upon distance, an endless persistence of loneliness stretching between who I was and who I have become.
I send my thoughts towards you like signals cast across the void, knowing they will never arrive, knowing the silence itself is the reply.
Sometimes I wonder whether you still look at the stars.
Whether your eyes still follow the moon across the water.
Whether you still pause for meteor showers.
Whether some small part of you remembers the names we gave to those distant lights.
Perhaps you do.
Perhaps you do not.
The stars would never tell me.
They simply burn.
And so I remain here beneath them, year after year, watching the heavens wheel overhead.
The galaxies drift.
The planets spin.
The seasons begin and end.
Everything moves forward except the part of me that still waits for your return.
One day the sun will die.
One day the constellations will scatter.
One day the galaxies themselves will thin and fade into the darkness beyond measure.
Yet I suspect the final thing my heart will surrender will not be hope.
It will be your name.
A small and fragile thing, carried through the ages like the last surviving star in a dying sky.
Burning.
Yearning.
Returning.
To a light that no longer shines back.
