As the skies offered us Barbault’s Basket, I looked up simply to witness the night. It wasn’t long until a shooting star lit up the sky, and it struck me in such a way:

Here’s to all the lovers of hope,
The ones who believed that love could grow
Even in dark places.
Whose goodness became the reason for staying too long.
Offering one more chance
After one more chance,
Trading fragments of ourselves
To keep stories of imagined light
Intact.

Was it hopeful to keep waiting?
Waiting for breadcrumbs to become a meal.
Settling for mirages instead of a well.
Did hope make me resilient?
Delusional?
Generous?
Or violent?

I had always chosen hope
As my drink of choice
In the aftermath of pain
But this cocktail of hope
Untethered from grief,
Tastes a lot like
Slow-poison.

I never wanted to befriend
Grief.
Too suffocating a feeling
The extinguisher of hope.

But on a silent night
Grief asks of us
To face today
As the truth.

Could it be
That grief is
The more honest drink?

When I was still a child
And my eyes were filled with sadness
My mother would tell me to
Go outside
And only come back
When I have stopped
Crying.

Decades later,
Someone who claimed to have
Loved me
Kept saying to me
“Don’t give me sad eyes”.

There was never
A safe place to be
Sad.
Nobody wanted
My fragments of grief
V i s i b l e.

So I became the great lover
Of hope.
A lie told a thousand times,
A thousand exits I failed to take.
A graveyard of
Expired stories and
Promises that fail to soothe me
Now
When grief doesn’t require me
To make-belief.

Now
I feel hope
Is heavier than grief.

Now
I learned that
Hope
Carries the wounds
That
Grief
Buries

So many voices tell us that
healing is to become whole.
Yet where is the room
That could hold our
Sad eyes
And our shrapnel
And our ghosts?

What if nothing about us needed to change?
What if we simply spent years
in atmospheres
that
benefited
from our disappearance?
with people who could only have us
with our lights out?

Last night,
I saw a shooting star pass beneath the Big Dipper.
A meteor is not a star.
For ages, it travels unseen through darkness—
as a fragment
Not a whole.
It does not become luminous because
it finally changes its nature.
It becomes luminous
when it enters an atmosphere
honest enough
to reveal what has always been there.

When the meteor crossed the sky,
The fragments inside me recognized the light
That traced its
Trajectory.

So may your hope never again
require your disappearance.
May grief arrive
not as darkness,
but as your witness.
To confirm the truth
others
could not bear
to hold.

And may you find
an atmosphere
where nothing is asked of you
except to arrive.

~

If you savored these words from XiRen, take a peek at her previous article on Elephant next: