You won’t find me amidst those stars, cast like a shadow at or away from fortune. My fate isn’t hung on the posts of birthday constellations, boiled down to daily platitudes and lucky guesses. All my empty wishes were extinguished despite the falling of some star, no candle snuffed or streak of light. The universe goes about its work, comfortable with general principles and extenuating circumstance. The wheels turn, the galaxies spin, and the world tumbles on and on, not worried about my whethers or my words. I might watch the skies, but they sure aren’t watching me.
Mostly, with a history like mine, it is stories and alibis. A reason placed into the sunken rhymes of happenstance. Explanations full of dependent clauses, blame owned or passed along to chance and change. We all have our crosses, we all play our parts. Certainties with endings so abrupt that all certainty is unhinged. Heady infatuations and little flames, all extinguished by the date of publication. Social forces and personal failings, mental illness and the price of sin.
There really isn’t anything left to tell. The years speed by, the days clot and drawl. Another spring, another afternoon crowned by sunlight mingling in the shadows of pines. Scars and passions, reflections and various impediments. The wary, weary awareness of unending limitations. Running on fumes as the fires burn out. Alive and beaten at a moment of personal handicap and social unrest. The whole wide world never quite what we name it, thinking that the mirror and our sanctified self-regard are even close to our story. Believing that we are exempt from systems we can never escape. Believing that the stories we created are all that can ever be, and that there is any other birth-rite than that of being another life in this rough and hungry world. Even our gods are lost to this long vast empty, dusted with all these countless common stars.
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