Reaching For Nothing

in your galaxy

i have always thought that i'm the moon.

from the moment i curled up on my side with eyes of wonder, mind of metaphors, i would stare out at the sky, a smile made of galaxies, eyes of planets, and freckles of stars. i traced patterns over my arms, drew flowers on my cheeks, swiped tears from my tired eyes, and i would stare at a universe with a silent soul that seemed to reverberate in my numb one as the night dragged on.

the pain has long since rooted itself in my chest, stolen my sleep to replace oblivion with something agonizing people called life. it haunts me during the day, it followed me to sleepless nights that had me too broken to cry and too whole to die, to keep me teetering on an edge i couldn't see beyond,  as a razor sharp as that between being awake and being asleep.

i toed that line, did it purposefully with eyelids drooping so the sky outside blurred. so invisible smiling galaxies twisted into frowns and eyes of planets couldn't see into the fractured thoughts circling my head. so stars turned to stripes across my vision and a smile would curl at the corner of my cheeks because even the sky could be broken if you tried enough to make it so.

those had always been my favorite parts, the stars i could
s

ee and the secrets i couldn't

the moon had always been my least favorite part of the sky. that's why i am the moon.

i am wholly underwhelming, liked only by those who don't care to learn who i truly am. my light is an illusion, merely a forced reflection of the rest of the world, of people whose smiles are genuine and whose hearts beat for reasons beyond survival.

i am nothing, a speck in something infinitely more complex than i am. powerless and simple, a pebble in a sea of gemstones.

a moon in a sky full of beautiful, shining stars.

i liked comparing other people to space, too.

there was something easier about seeing the endless sea of human beings surrounding me as something as distant as the great expanses of space. something beautiful about the idea of floating alone in a sliver of this universe, where nobody could reach me because they were all doing the same.

and it made people more beautiful, in my eyes. even the ones who make my heart ache and my mind sink into darkness were better when i could see them as a fragment of the abyss i stared into every night.

my parents are stars, the distant kind that glimmer faintly from afar but shine bright once you get close. the kind who warm and would one day fuel their own slice of their galaxy. the kind i stare at to feel insignificant and safe when i can't sleep at night.

my brother is an asteroid, flying through life with some semblance of an organized system that is hard to understand but impossible to ignore.

the boy who bullies me at school is a meteor, chaotic and violent, but too small to truly hurt to do anything without burning himself out first.

and the girl i used to have a crush on was a comet, beautiful like blazed of blue staining the night sky. but comets' tails could burn out, could be extinguished, and i thought hers might be in the process of fading.

everyone can fit into my personal version of space. most people i encounter do, form a beautiful mosaic of stars and planets and asteroids and meteoroids.

my favorite part, though, was sitting and watching it all go by, an effortless arrangement of everything good and bad and in between that amazed every awkward and uncertain part of me.