The sun and the moon are perfect mirrors of each other: reflections. They embody day and night—contemplation and action. They are perfect opposites. Despite forever being a pair, they can never rise together or laugh their way through the night until the birds rise, chirping good morning to the world. They spend eternity on opposite sides of the Earth, so close, yet so far from each other.
The sun is the apex of light and joy, a symphony of all that is beautiful. It creates life, allowing trees and flowers to flourish come spring. Burning shoulders and backs in the heat of summer as people forget themselves in each other and their adventures. Meanwhile, the moon muses with the far-off, evening stars. Few stay awake to watch the moon and the little light it brings, but those who do bear witness to its scars are presented as craters larger than the widest mountain.
Their duality has been a source of curiosity for hundreds of years by cities, poets, and every common observer who has aimed their gaze at the skies. The sun hides behind a shroud of blinding light while the moon bears its scars for the world to see, illuminated by the sun’s light.
Light floods the world at the behest of the sun, scaring away the monsters under beds and nightmares that have haunted sleep, bringing the sunrise and melting the evening frost. The moon rises with the night, bringing fireflies and owls, stars and sunsets. Darker things creep in the shadows of the night, figments of a child’s imagination as they stare into their dim closets and the black under their beds.
My friends have always equated me to that captivating moon. Rising with a darkening sky and falling away into irrelevance as light floods the treeline of the Midwest. It may be the silver jewelry that adorns my hands and wrists, draped across my neck and ears or the inky black makeup that borders my eyes and the rich colors that cover me from head to toe.
Perhaps it is the way that I speak—described by others as poetic, a string of pearls and peridots gliding from my tongue into the world. Despite this, I believe it is because I am a pessimist, thinking the worst of every person and situation I collide with as the moon broke apart from the Earth eons ago in a blaze of fire and rock.
I am only what has been given to me. The freckles chasing each other from ear to ear, curving over my nose and under my brows inherited from summers spent in the sun. The cascading curls that mirror my mother’s. The bluntness that was instilled in me a decade ago by my sister explaining how the world works, and that it isn’t as pretty as the stars that pepper the night sky.
My faults are not as obvious as the craters on the moon but rather disguised by the inky black that covers my eyes and the pretty words that coat hard-to-deliver advice.
I will only ever be a reflection of the people around me, the people who provide the light in my life, yet I can refract their beauty and create my own.
