i am the sky

As the moon and stars swirled around me overhead, I was suddenly overcome by a sense of freedom.

Freedom--fresh, ripe, and raw. A feeling I'd never had--never been allowed to have--until that night. That night, when the blanket of the sky was my home, the stars my family. All of them winking at me like we were in on some big secret.

Tell me your secrets, I whispered to the sky, my breath swirling out of my mouth and up to the stars in the cold winter air. Tell me everything.

And it did. It did, and I listened. It told me all its stories--the ones you know, like how constellations formed and meteors dropped to Earth--but also a few other ones it had never told anyone before. I tucked these stories away for safekeeping and promised to carry them for all eternity.

Finally, after a few hours of me lying on the snow-covered ground, a million years' worth of tales morphing, shifting, changing in the world above, I told the sky my stories as well. Stories about my family, who couldn't care less that I was gone. Stories about my friends, who had stomped on my heart and left it alone, abandoned, bleeding on the eighth-grade hallway. Leaving me soulless, a thick shield in place of where my heart once thrived.

I'll be your family now, the sky told me. And all your friends. I can be all of that and much, much more.

I believe you, I told it. And I did, with every inch of my heart, which seemed to have been retrieved from the eighth-grade hallway and was bleeding a little less, aching a little less.

That was when I felt it. The wind, swirling around me, faster, harder, until finally, it lifted me up, carrying me towards the sky. 

You belong with us, it chanted, softly at first, then harder. Soon the chanting became something beyond words, beyond anything you could ever imagine. Soon it was the beating of my heart, the feel of the wind against my cheek. And then it was nothing at all, just darkness, just sky, towering above me and below me with no end in sight. You always did. Here is a world that can never harm you ever again.

And it wouldn't, I knew. Knowing that spread a feeling within my body I'd never felt before. A glowing warmth, a fairy light. Belonging. 

And then, before I knew it, everything I ever had known was gone. Ripped from me in an instant. I was something else entirely--something bright, something vast--a ball of fire that kills if you ever dare set foot on it, but that winks at you in the sky, innocent-looking, like you're in on some big secret.

I was a star.

If the sky was a garden, I was just one plant, but I felt like everything. Anger and sadness and joy and peacefulness, all wrapped into one. Exactly the feeling I felt when I first stepped out to gaze up at the sky, those few hours back that felt like years ago now. Freedom. Now that it was mine, I was never going to let it go. Never ever ever.

Nowadays, I smile down at stargazers every night when they come out of their houses to watch, coats and parkas wrapped around them tightly, shivering in the frosty air. Some have sky-watching apps in front of them, their faces obscured by their large, dark phones, wanting desperately to see something, anything, but doing the opposite. Others, however, stare right up at me and smile. They ask if I can tell them my secrets, our secrets, just like I myself did, once upon a time. 

And I do. I tell them the secrets of the sky, tales of constellations and meteors and magic. They listen quietly, attentively, then sometimes tell me their secrets as well. And the special people--the ones most in need, the ones most afraid--I lift up to the heavens so they can join me and my family for all eternity.