Arcadia

23

You wonder why we hide from the closest stars and marvel at a skyful of distant ones.
The closer the star, the more the heat. We were taught that the sun is but a star, but is it? The sun doesn't twinkle, the sun isn't a silver dot in the black sky, the sun isn't far and high above the world. The sun sustains us, but in summer the heat gets too much to take. It gets real and we hide away, we feel it's heat.
We are people of the night. We prefer silver dots that wink at us if we keep staring. We want the shadows that leave us free to imagine, to contemplate, to take wild guesses. We don't even want to know what the shadows hold.
In the end, they are all balls of fire, helium and hydrogen, burning each other out. We make suns and stars out of them, and it's all because of what we see from down here, and what we see are but what we are. The distant stars draw us more, if only because of that distance. We'll never dare to get close.