First star I see tonight—
not with eyes, but with the soul's aching lid
half-lowered in the hush of dusk.
A silver pin on the robe of the infinite—
not born, but remembered—
as if I’d known your name
before I knew the name of wanting.
There, on the edge of twilight,
your light brushed my face—
not skin, but the self beneath it—
and I knew, I knew,
that some part of me my entire life
had lived only in the hope of this nearness.
You weren’t there, not in form,
but in feeling, in feeling you've always been,
in the slow hush between my heartbeat and my breath,
where a child's whisper lives:
I wish I may, I wish I might…
Yes, I did. I wished.
Not for gold or glory,
but our souls to know each other,
even for one breath of the forever
we glimpsed in that first meeting of light.
The Greeks thought life was areté—
excellence, glory, the dance of form and purpose,
a striving toward the perfect shape of love.
Even in longing, they sought beauty.
Kierkegaard said life is a leap,
a trembling step out over the abyss,
faith like a candle in storm—
you leap, or you linger and vanish.
To him, love was a wager
against despair.
Then Sartre unbuttoned the sky,
said we invent our own meaning—
existence before essence—
that we are free, condemned to be free,
and love is a choice
made new each day,
without promise from the stars.
But oh, my friend who I loved so quickly,
Philosophy is but the mind's math.
While you are the soul’s poem.
And I—
I am not a puzzle to be solved,
but a mystery to be lived.
So I lift my arm now,
bare and open,
palm to the star, to you—
light-years or miles, it matters not—
and ask,
not with lips but with laughter in the blood:
Will you dance with me?
But you are not here,
not yet... never, I fear. But then the
Answer rings in my bones like bells:
We already are dancing,
we always have been,
and we always will be.