When I was younger, I was afraid of the dark.
I dreaded when daylight would turn its back on me, and as the night crept in, I was forced to grow accustomed to the hole above me that was the midnight sky. It swallowed me when the sun set and engulfed me in its nothingness. The ceiling of my vulnerable bedroom swam with the nightmares that I had conjured from my imagination, lingering like smoke in the air. I felt so small when the dark tent above me held no light but the moon that was propped in the sky afar.
But one day, the stars came out. Perched outside my window and sewn into the darkness, the only source of light in the dullness of everything above me. They shimmered like sparkles and flashed in the blackness like a beacon. With the stars came you. I started to believe, for a little while, that the night was not so bad after all. The dark got a little less scary for a moment.
The curse of being a wishful thinker has caught up to me now, I realize, for I have spent too much time relying on the stars that remind me so much of you when they were only there for half of the day.
I want to ask you why you stopped being my stars all of a sudden. Maybe I talked too much, or maybe I shouldn’t have depended on you or the stars to be there when both only end up appearing for just half of the day. You say I tired you out because I cared a little too much for your liking. I was too clingy, too emotional, too talkative, too loud. I spent all my wishes on you and the stars who would only end up burning out when I needed them the most. I am too much for the stars that I once called my own.
If I could do it all over again, I would just try to be enough. Because that is all I’ve ever wanted to be to you, to the person who was all my stars in the sky.
My face in a crowded room is just another now, and your shoelaces suddenly become all too interesting when I pass by you in the hallways. My notification at the top of your screen is one to ignore, and all the remembrances of us that I hold so close to my heart no longer matter to you. Our rotting, dissipating memories sneak up on me and remind me that you don’t care that you are my stars, you don’t care that I miss you, and you don’t care that when I needed you the most, you were never there.
You don’t care.
Do you know how tiring it is to care so much about someone who just leaves like that? Do you know how it feels to see the one person who truly made me happy let me go so easily?
I wasn’t even worth a warning, a call, or a heads-up. You just stopped showing up in the sky and left me sitting at the window, waiting for you to come back and wondering what I did to deserve all of this. I felt like a fool, sitting in the dark under my covers as a little kid, terrified of imaginary monsters in my closet. But you have made me feel like an even bigger fool now; I am still holding on to the hope that maybe the stars will reappear and everything will go back to the way it was a couple of months ago. I am a fool for adamantly refusing to let go of you when you let go a long time ago.
Yet I still don’t believe that I wasted my wishes on you. I saw the way we used to smile and the way we used to laugh, and even if it was never real to you, at least it was all real to me. That is why I keep trying, which is more than you can say you do these days. That is why I would still live in the dark again if it meant you’d come out to shine for just one more night.
Oh, how I miss you. Because the sky is full of stars now, but they never shine for me anymore. They just remind me of how we went from all to nothing in the blink of an eye, becoming strangers with memories only best friends would have. For you and I are the same people, in the same place, at the same time, yet never so far apart. I wish I was worth enough to you that you would still gleaming be in my hollow, black world. I wish you missed me as much as I miss you.
Yet I smile a sad, sad smile.
We live under the same sky, at least.
