I've been thinking about pretty words, and love poems, and long songs. And the way the wind moves the clouds around. The way the sun and moon color them. How the light is reflected on the ground.

I saw a little duck swim across the water, kicking up tiny waves. A crow flies overhead, and a sparrow does the same. The whistle of birdsong, with all its twists and turns. There aren't many living things here. A dead moth in the window's crevice; a dead bird decaying on the ground. At anything that moves I wonder. At everything that's still I revere.

It's standing in front of the silent body of that little dead bird, on the mat in front of an office building, wanting to touch it and lift it up but not being able to move. It's standing in a dark classroom and being spooked for a moment by my own shadowy reflection in the door's glass, and letting the night envelop me, strangely. It's the urge to run away, to wake up at 5am and ride my bike to the river again. It's getting used to the wind's bitter cold when wearing too little outside. It's reading poetry and trying not to cry in class. It's headphones and shutting out the world while leaning against a hard surface. It's the many gifts that I have here at home, and the revelation that it's possible that so many people care. It's morning coffee with sunlight streaming onto my plate. It's baking cookies on impulse. Walking with no purpose, running with music, staring at a sunrise.

I stand silent as a little speck of dust. I stand alone at the center of the world. I stand, with my back to my friends, but holding out my arms. In the mirror I can see the faces I almost forgot. I look back from the mirror at my front.

City lights drive darkness into the heart's corner. There is no longer night. We're an island in the middle of nowhere, living in the delusion that we have everything, that we are everything. But the universe is real: the universe is alive. Stars still roam the night sky. They are long dead, but their lights disagree. Somewhere outside, somewhere far, far away, their remnants sleep. Life makes room for entropy.

In the dark, I sit. I light a lamp with a tiny candle, and I place it up high; I think. I think thoughts. I think pictures. I think dreams. I think myself untethered to reality.

I want to give my all. Hurt myself and feel bad, then feel more. Let the things almost kill me, then rise back up from the dead. Burn. Light up. Explode.

I'll be a star someday. Maybe a sun. Never a black hole.