The stars are out tonight.

The stars are out tonight.

We are drawn to turn our gazes upward--to look at brightness, somehow defiant at the heavens looking down at our mediocrity. Answers constellate themselves, depending on what we want to see. Trace-the-dots. How often we mistake their combined form for another, only because we don't know where to look or what to see! They seem to be grateful for the distance from our questioning gaze, wise to avoid questions that are answered by experience. We were born from stardust after all.

They continue to burn, oblivious to the answers we've assigned to them. And we continue to gaze at their enduring death, yearning to burn through life like the glorious moment of a rebellious falling star. Maybe it's the pursuit that matters--the blaze of light across the dark sky. A Shooting Star! A Falling Star. (Close our eyes, make a wish.) We are changed by the desire for something beyond THIS. Something MORE than this.

Maybe because the stars burn so so bright, we're meant to witness only their dying, lest we perish in their terrible beauty. Incapable of surviving such brilliance, they tell us--THIS, should be enough...for now.

Relieved, they are glad for our silence. Enough for tonight. We pry our eyes away with difficulty. They are just stars after all. And we just hope for meaning in such tragic deaths.