She has always loved the stars.
With such a magnitude and an ineffable overtone of enamor, she loves them in a way that she has never loved anything else before.
She’s never been into astrology; people tend to let their minds jump straight to that when she expresses her love for the stars.
It’s always stricken her as interesting that it’s such a widely accepted idea of the stars determining everything about a person’s life, but it’s not her belief system. Regardless, she doesn’t shoot it down as it serves as food for thought in such an ever-changing and constantly evolving world.
She may not understand it, but she respects it wholeheartedly. It’s truly a beautiful thought to her; something she holds so close to her heart yet is so inestimably far from her grasp could hold some power.
That’s not why she loves the stars, though.
It’s simpler than that: each one has a story.
Each one has a life cycle that it lives out before its unfathomable—yet impending—death strips it from this universe.
Someplace in this seemingly unbounded expanse of space is the home of her absolute favorite duo: Cassiopeia, the asterism, and Andromeda, the constellation characterized by the spiral nebula of the same name.
Like astrology, mythology doesn’t exactly align with her belief system, but she, an artist, cherishes the stories beyond comprehension.
Cassiopeia—the namesake of the constellation to which she feels some unexplainable tie and is so unfathomable to her—was a vain and arrogant queen in Macedonian mythology.
In her selfishness, she boasted about her young and naive daughter, Andromeda, being more beautiful than any other being; this angered Poseidon to the point where he sent a flood to her kingdom, and the only way to appease him was to sacrifice her beloved Andromeda, despite her having done nothing wrong.
The two reside in the sky, directly next to each other after their forced separation. Cassiopeia sits on her throne: five bright dots against the mass of space laid out for lightyears in every direction. Near her mother’s feet is Andromeda; by the standards of the girl, Andromeda is the brightest star in the sky.
Andromeda was loved, and she loved, but that love hurt her. But, in the sky, it doesn’t make her shine any less bright, and it doesn’t make her any less worthy of the love she should have received.
Andromeda did not deserve that pain, and neither does the girl.
She attempts, in every meaning of the word, to locate the pair wherever she may be; however, that quixotry has led to more failure than success. She’s almost lovelorn—the way she feels so deeply connected to any celestial object she learns about—to the point where the pulchritude of the stars is merely a trivial aspect of their importance.
So, what else to do but watch them?
She watches the night sky with such a wistful purity in her heart for such a seraphic grouping of infinitely many things—ideas, concepts, forms of life—out there.
It’s the utter and complete opposite of her once-solipsistic understanding of the world.
It’s a hyper-awareness of the endless expanse of life and art and cosmos, and she would put everything she had into learning about them.
Because, when it comes down to it, she knows a few things for certain.
One: she will continue to look out for the familiar faces in the night sky, wherever she may be.
Two: she, like Andromeda, is simply a girl in a vast span of others. Ultimately, they are all the same.
And, three: eventually, she will learn to view herself with the same appreciation as she does her soul-ties in the sky.
