On Stargazing

But oh, the stars, when they first appear like the dimples of the Universe, it’s face bearing a pale crescent moon smile, sunshine eyes closed tightly towards one hemisphere, eyebrows made of Milky Way mist…When Shakespeare said “Such stuff as dreams are made of,” he could have been gazing with unflinching awe at the sky, on a night not unlike tonight, under the same sky that is our witness today.

There are stories in these stars, some so many billions of light years old that they have reached The End before our pupils even widen enough to absorb their light. But the moral of these stories holds the immortality of the Universe. Starlight – like the cremated ashes of other lives, ever-present on the mantelpieces of our minds, morals of stories slowly unwinding like time itself – has something to teach us. If our lives are like the stars, the stories we make of them will come to fruition long after we meet our own ends.

What will the moral of my life be? Will it sparkle and fade? Will it travel long and fast through eons of immeasurable stardust, purple, brown, orange, grey – then bursting, fearlessly, onto the face of another woman’s starry night? Will it inspire? Will it be binary, dancing for decades, locked in the starlight-love of another? Will it paint a picture – a warrior (Orion), a Queen (Casiopia), women in flight (the Pleiades)?

“Such stuff as dreams are made of…” Onward, to bed then, dreaming under stars, which once were merely dreams themselves.