Moon and Stars

The distance between earth and heaven is a heart beat. I close my eyes and in one palpitation I can feel you all around me. You cover my body in a sensation that can only be described as love. But there is something different in the way your spirit tingles my skin now. It’s no longer the brush of a familiar hand, intimately acquainted. Instead of increasing my heart rate to the alarming speed of lust, you steady it. You wrap me in a new kind of love that is comforting, peaceful, and safe.

And while I have you here, inexplicably close without a shred of evidence to prove it, I speak to you. I speak to you in words that have no syllables, no letters. I ask for a million things: guidance, protection, insight, clarity... anything that I'm struggling to find for myself. But as the list of wordless prayers stretches on, it melts into the warm buzz of your love. And I am silent.

My heart reminds me that there's nothing I need from you now that I can't provide for myself. This exercise in connecting heaven and earth is just my mind's way of checking that you're still here. And you are. But you're no longer my moon or my stars. You're not even the subtle glow of a night sky cloaked in clouds. 

But I'm not saddened by this. My heart rejects my brain trying to process this as a bad thing. Because even if my sky is dark, it means that it still needs to be. Maybe the black of night is my reminder that the only guiding light I need is the one that burns inside of me. A fiery golden flame that's invisible when spending all of my time looking up.

So I search inside of myself while I feel your blanket of love lift from my skin. I don't mourn you leaving because I know the distance between earth and heaven is just a heart beat. That if I am ever mixed up, searching with my head in the sky, I can close my eyes and you'll come to me. No longer as my moon and  my stars, but as a gentle reminder that everything I need has been in me all along.