i lied there on the pavement, eyes fixed on the big dipper, waiting for the stars to fall apart all at once, or for a car to run over me, whichever came first. and there i was, staring at the space and the emptiness looked back at me, and for a second, it felt like looking at my own chest; the stars, my bones, slowly coming undone. i wondered if someone felt that way too. i wondered if someone else gazed at the constellations and thought, maybe the stars are disillusioned with the galaxy and so that’s why they fell during meteor showers. or maybe they were lost causes dressed as angels jumping off bridges in heaven, ever the cynic. maybe it wasn’t something poetic. maybe it was watching celestial bodies

i lied there on the pavement, under flickering lamp posts that looked bigger than the stars. the poems always said that stargazing is romantic it wasn’t. ironically tonight, i lost count of the falling stars while wondering why they’d gone too soon. wondering if they’d survived the fall. wondering if they knew that their descent was burying me in the sound of my breath. maybe in an hour, the black space in my chest would consume me and then i too, would be a shooting star lost in peripheral views.

and i hope i would survive the fall. and i kind of hope i wouldn’t.