I often find myself gazing up at the sky, looking for stars. 

More likely than not, my search will turn up fruitless—too many obstacles stand in the way. 

Whether it be the steady brilliance of the moon or the garish glow of civilization, every snag derails my pursuit of ancient light time and time again. 

Yesterday, it was the snow. 

Cheek pressed against the misty back-seat window, I stared up into the chaotic flurry, struggling to make out anything more than a few feet away. Beyond the mayhem, the cloudy heavens only further dampened my search. 

The blaze of hundreds of headlights revealed only the road ahead and the cars littered along the side of it, their distraught drivers freezing helplessly in the storm. 

I kept on looking to the sky, looking further into the pandemonium that caused such misfortune. 

I look to the sky on foggy nights and smog-filled evenings in bustling cities; I look to the sky on bright afternoons, unconcerned about the light of the sun beating on my back. Day after day, my hopeless chases refuse to prosper. 

Even during the clearest, darkest nights, I search the skies and come up empty-handed, my blurry vision obscuring the tiny specks that I yearn to see. 

I often find myself gazing up at the sky, but I’m not looking for stars. 

I know that they’re there, and that’s all I need to know. 

That tomorrow, when I wake up, the aged light will still be shining towards our planet, trying its best against the morning sun. That for countless tomorrows to come, it will do the same. That even when I no longer live to count tomorrows, the distant rays will soldier on. 

I want to know that the stars are indifferent to me. 

I want to know that the stars don’t see me just as they don’t see the grass between the sidewalk cracks shooting up come spring. That to the stars, I’m just another speck of dust. 

I often find myself gazing up at the sky, simply to remind myself that the stars did not align for me. 

Under the light of the stars that I cannot see, I float: weightless. In their indifference, I bathe, free of the pressure that the trillions of trillions of atoms went through to become stars in the first place. 

Yesterday, I looked to the sky, and even in the back seat of our small Sedan, I was free.