I used to trace constellations in parking lots
pretending the streetlights were galaxies
trying to tell me something greater lived beyond the curtain, too far past closing
Maybe they were right
For years, I mistook my own kindness for weakness
hope, for another cruel trick of desire
Every sign felt like static
a song half-tuned on the radio
I kept trying to translate the universe
but it was speaking in a language
I hadn’t lived enough to understand
And then there was you
Your name
the very same one I used to write
on the subject line of unrequited love letters, forever doomed to a box underneath my bed
None of them were for you
But now
That name will be the last on my lips
Hope is supposed to be a dangerous thing
It feels like the stars have been
collecting our fragments for years
assembling something I could never see
from the ground
Every wrong turn
every empty midnight drive
every almost
was a brushstroke
in a painting too wide for me to recognize
until now
You were written in the negative space
I just needed to learn
how to look for what was missing
Now I see it
how the colors bleed into one another
how every heartbreak was a necessary hue
I didn’t manifest you
I remembered you
I called you by every other name
until you answered
And when you did,
the sky finally exhaled
The stars, the ones I begged for meaning
they whispered
“See? It was always going to be this way.”