How Does Astronomy Work? by Frank Ampil
Stars are an oft-curious thing, no? Scattered, brilliant, and cataclysmic up close but mere blemishes as long as our feet keep contact with the ground beneath us. Sometimes, I plant my soles into whatever concrete or dirt lay under and shoot my eyes up, trying to see what our ancient Greek astronomers did. How four stars, so far apart they might as well be nothing to each other, somehow fill in the shape of a ram. Aries, they call it. Formerly a farmhand, then the ram on which the Golden Fleece was crafted from, then just a regular ram. Eons of transformation and these four points are forever defined by the others, the parts of a greater sum. But I don’t see it—how these specific stars are important specifically to the rest of their astral cabal. How some people just base their personality off of them. How they’re impulsive, and brash, and all-too passionate just because a bunch of stars in the shape of what was apparently a ram cluttered itself in space at just the right place and the right time. Then you are on my mind, matter-of-factly in your stance—like no matter the unstoppable force I could create to deal with you, you just wouldn’t budge. So far inside my thoughts that your image almost seems delayed. That you are so many lightyears away I never realize I’m just wasting my time with only your shadow. The first time we met derails my train of thought, bright and razor-like as it slashes across a black nothing. Our first kiss rises above the horizon, but I only feel the sunlight splash against whatever lay inside me. A heat conjured by memory—almost like seeing our initials carved in wood—only reminds one of what isn’t warm anymore. The day you left. Grief sat soundlessly in my throat; whatever I wanted to scream would be rendered silent in the vacuum of space you used to occupy. Sometimes, you pass me and I can only look away, in awe of the light I could have bathed in for days. But you burn too bright for me now that I don’t know how I wasn’t blinded any sooner. You were a supernova looking for another space to disrupt and I am the nebula you left behind. So I apologize to the first astronomers I can think of. I see it now—how stars can make someone so brash and impulsive and all-too compassionate. How four stars can make the outline of a ram, and me the outline of someone who used to be whole.
All because he was at the right place, at the right time.
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