Evelyn Alt

The stars themselves might be gone, but their light continues to be studied.

The night is littered with ghosts.

The day is too, I guess, but sunlight shrouds them with her smile.

I don’t like science, but I like the sky. 

There’s something romantic about it all, isn’t there? 

Enough romance that it has been handed the burden of humanity since the beginning of time. It has seen sacrifice stories of loved ones, of heroes and villains, of men with music and women with poetry, and horses with the wings of a bird. 

Tales of bravery and love, of innovation and discovery, are weaved among its glittering ornaments. 

It carries enough romance that every heart becomes a poet with only a single glance up. 

The vastness, dripping through torn seams of forgotten hymns and passing centuries, holds a love like no other. 

And yet, the night is haunted by its ghosts.

When you look at a star, what you really see is the light it gives off—a light that takes years to travel to our eyes.

The stars we are seeing could already be dead. They could have been dead for years. And still, we lift our moon-drenched fingertips to their light and gaze at the legacy of something decades gone. 

It also means that there could be stars out there, newborn ones we have yet to see, that watch our naive eyes follow their burnt-out predecessors through the night.

I sit under these ghosts and the ones soon to be, and I wonder if they ever laugh.

Humans thought them to be eternal. When nothing lasts forever, the stars remain. That is why we left the buried treasure of our history in their arms, sure it would be safe for eternity. 

That is the irony of it all.

In centuries, when the light is no longer transmitted, and the constellations that connect us throughout time begin to crumble, will it all begin again?

When Orpheus loses his lyre and Orion, his dog, when Cassiopeia no longer waltzes through Andromeda, and the Gemini twins have fallen silent, will we then invent new history to throw across the heavens?

It’s hard for me to imagine how much of the universe I study never existed at the same time as me at all.

It’s hard for me to reconcile with the fact that there are parts of it out there that I will never get to experience simply because I was born too early. 

I want to see all the new stars and the stories they bring.

I want to watch us shapeshift over mountains of time until I am the ancient one, and my neighborhood is a tourist destination to “how things used to be.”

I’ll never get over the languages I’ve missed out on, the books I’ll never read, the jokes I’ll never hear, the forms of humanity I’ll never experience because I can’t live as long as the night sky. 

I mourn the ghosts I gaze at each night from the hill behind my house. I mourn the unseen stars that gaze at me.