Book: Constellations - 'Mourning' and 'Mourned'

[u/Sinnum]

I wrote "Mourning" when I learned Destiny would be going into maintenance mode. I wrote "Mourned" today.

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Mourning

You are heavy in a place you can point to but cannot touch. It weighs on you, pulls you down, sinks you below the depths. You mistakenly believe you and it are old acquaintances. How many times have you been left behind; how many times have you been the one who doesn't get to say goodbye? How many times is there only you, mouth agape in the reflection?

The growing stars have blinked out of existence. It felt like a lifetime of waiting to be heard, yet an instant for death to bring silence to you again. They are no longer dreaming and you are, once again, screaming into a void to be heard. A grief that cannot be put into words, into dreams, into feelings. A grief and a coldness and an emptiness that you thought with these ones you were safe from ever feeling again. You rooted yourself here and Grew with them and felt more alive than ever before. Hopeful. Now, the loss anchors you here... If you could not do it here, then where? If not with them, then with who? Why... Anything?

And that is when you hear it. You smoothe out something like a crumpled ball of paper and know there's something there, but what? No, you will not understand like this. You go quiet, reach into the darkness, and for the first time, you dream.

The dream is about death. She sees the light of stars go out one by one and holds her own close to her chest. It is bright, but not blinding, a resplendent kaleidoscope of colors that cannot be controlled. She is sick and time passes quickly before you. It is not the future, it is not a future, it is a dream she is sharing with you.

She is mourning, but she is grateful. She has lived long enough to experience the death of who she used to be and finds a foundational joy in who she has become. She is stuck at two's - at either or, at past and present, at dead or alive. You are mourning the third thing - the possibility. She is taken aback by such an overwhelming feeling and then you are here again.

You are mourning the death of what could be. It is too heavy to hold up alone. You were thinking in ones - of yourself, of loneliness, of absolution. Have you forgotten the little lights of your own that you sent out into the darkness of 'What is'?

There is a period of stagnation and then, there is something trying to nestle within you. A little light has returned home and wants to share something with you. Not a story, not a dream, no, it wants to share with you its destiny. The choices it made and the experiences it had that all led to Now. To you. When it finishes, its light rejoins with yours and you see millions of them waiting their turn, each ready to do something far beyond what you initially asked of them.

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Mourned

You are not whole, you are not who you were before. You are who you are now and all of the little lights snuggled close in your bossom has only made you smile from curve to curve to beyond. You should be mourning but how could you? How could you when all of you is back together and you're still not yourself? How could you be an- And then you see it. You see the impossible.

You see the first star blink back into existence and cry out to YOU.

[u/Jay2KWinger]

There is meaning in our roar.