Held Aloft by the Stars
a light that burns for no one but me
A wish begins in the hollows of your heart; a battered seed, too stubborn to die.
It takes root inside you, unfurling thick vines upon the crumbling walls. And when you finally rid yourself of it, it’s no longer yours—but neither is it theirs.
It dances, basking in its own brilliance, the flame of a candle; shining bright yet burning quickly. It leaved behind it a scent—a faint sweetness tainted with the charred candle wick—that you can’t quite name, and stays with you; unwanted yet peculiarly comforting.
The stars speak to me. Their tired arms ache from carefully cradling each dream. They burn so fiercely, and with it, they feel pain very intensely; they tell me. They aren’t here to fullfil our needs, but we claim they are all the same; greedy hands clutching light we don’t deserve.
Time and time again, I’ve chided myself for wishing for something I could live without. I probably don’t deserve to hold the light either, let alone converse with the stars.
Every wish is a thief. It slips into the pockets of a stranger’s, unnoticed, stealing just enough to tip the scales. I wonder who I’ve robbed today.
I pick them up from the ground, even when they shatter. The shards bite into my skin, drawing blood as my fingers wrap around the jagged edges. You simply can’t leave them be; it would treason to youself, to the hope you hold—or held—in your heart.
But wishing was never hope, was it? You demand the stars reshape the Universe to your liking. But the Universe doesn’t bend to their will. It is unfeeling, untouched by your pleas, and no amount of desperation can change its nature. So, you turn your wrath onto the stars, where begging turns into frustration, and eventually into anger and blame.
The fault was never in our stars, but still, we curse them—resent their glow for all they refuse to give us. No matter the truth. I guess that’s just human nature, isn’t it? We take so much from the stars; even the very blood coursing through our bodies is part made up of stardust. But did you ever even think thank them?
We take, and take, and still, we are left wanting. The stars never ask for our thanks, but we never stop taking. We ask them to be everything—our light, our warmth, our answer—but they are nothing more than what we can never fully possess. We are made of stardust, yes, but it is only the dust we are left with in the end.
And so, we wish. And we break. And we begin the cycle again.
A lot of the fragilty in human nature is revealed when we wish. When we make a wish, what is it that we’re really doing? Sure, the logical standpoint is that you know it probably won’t get granted, so why do you do it anyways?
At the core of most wishes is a desire for command. Life is wildly unpredictable, and often, our circumstances are beyond our control. When we wish, we want to change the unchangeable, to impose some semblance of order on the tumult around us. Reassurance doesn’t necessarily have to come from the wish becoming a reality, rather the ressurance that you can control the uncontrollable aspects of your life, even if this power is purely imagined.
Everyone at some point in their life has experienced longing for a simply unattainable thing. The act of wishing itself allows us to project that longing, freeing us from some of the burden of having to carry it. Whether that’s on a shooting star, birthday candles or even just yelling into the void, the lightening of our day to day load is satisfying in it of itself, even when if we don’t reach our ‘desired outcome’. (I say this in brackets because it could even be a dream we’ve long since abandoned, that we still haven’t rid ourselves of the though of.)
Wishing is both an expression of hope and a confrontation with hopelessness. On one hand, it represents an inherent belief that something better is possible—that there’s a way out of our current dissatisfaction. On the other hand, it exemplifies the futitlity of our desires. No matter how much we want to be, we’re often not in control of the outcome of certain things. The stars will not always answer, the candle flame doesn’t even have a chance at remembering your wish befor you blow it out, and the void is well.. just a void. In this light, wishing is inherently just acceptance with what we know we cannot control.
For many (including myself sometimes), wishing can be a form of emotional coping. We can whisper a wish out into the world because we know there is going to be no threat of failure. And there’s a certain beauty in that; a wish—unlike a goal—has no actual expectation of excution. It allows us to dwell on the What If’s without facing What Is.
Ultimately, you can wish all you like—no matter what you expect to get out of it. Without that hope in our lives, would it really be worth living? Often, it feels that to stop wishing would be to surrender to an overall bland and boring life. (and I despise being bored)
you have no idea how much i love this ♡ wow
reading this made me so so emotional!! such beautiful writing <3