Black Hole
You were a star once.
I think about that more than most.
The kind that burned
without knowing anything was watching.
And when you had nothing left to give,
you didn’t scatter.
You pulled yourself inward
until the word inward
lost its meaning.
I’ve been trying to learn that.
They mapped the universe and found you everywhere,
quiet anchors at the centers of things,
not terrorizing, just holding.
It is strange to find comfort
in something that does not offer it.
I sat with the numbers once:
93 billion light years of observable universe,
two trillion galaxies,
and not one of them
consulted me before forming.
And somehow that is the most peaceful thing
anyone has ever told me.
I used to carry the weight of being perceived.
Of mattering in rooms
that would forget me by Tuesday.
You carry the weight of everything
and make no face about it.
You don’t explain yourself.
Not to the ones with careful instruments,
not to the ones who named you
after the darkest word they knew.
You exist at a frequency we don’t have ears for yet.
I wonder what waits past the edge of knowing,
where the rules go quiet
and something stranger takes over.
Not nothing. Never nothing.
Just a language
we haven’t been patient enough to learn.
I’m not afraid of the forgetting.
That my name will dissolve
the way all names do,
given enough time and enough silence.
Because somewhere right now a star is collapsing
into something more powerful
than it ever was luminous.
And it doesn’t need anyone to witness it to be true.
Neither do I.
“The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you” -Neil deGrasse Tyson