I’ve known love, and I’ve known loss.

I’ve known love that held me into a purple morning, a lover’s lips whispering warm secrets into my neck’s half-moon. I’ve known love that left my heart raw and peeled and exfoliated until little of it remained. I’ve known love that changed time, that made weeks into decades and years into seconds and memories into eternity. I’ve welcomed love, and I have run from it. I’ve taken pain and caused it. But it is all a part of me. They are all a part of me. Because love, and our perception of it, isn’t composed of one. It’s composed of all. Love is a constellation, a series of luminous and fading points that make us whole.

The shooting star that crosses your path so quickly, you almost miss him. He dazzles so brightly, you’re afraid to blink. You want to take in as much of him as you can, set wishes on him, believe in his possibility. But then he departs as quickly as he arrived, his short-lived brilliance leaving only the hazy glimmer of hope about you. His beauty is in the what if, in the unfulfilled, in the deepest desires of your own imagination.

The dying star, he who starts off so fast, so much faster than the others, so passionate and bold and true. But he can’t give you what you seek. He once did perhaps, give parts of himself to another, but now, he shines just before he goes, helplessly lost to intimacy forever. He is but a shadow of who he was, and you are but a memory of who he once knew.

The black hole, the one who leaves little in his wake. The one you let take you, consume your constellation and tear you from limb to limb, until you feel as though stretching to infinite still won’t be enough to show him, to prove it. There is little for you to do once he has you in his grasp. You wait, and you feel yourself go. You feel yourself lose it all. When you finally emerge, you are not the same.

There are only pieces of you left. Pieces of what you knew, covered by debris of what you now know. You are in parts, a person of fragments. But somewhere beneath the shreds of pain and shards of distrust, it remains: a small ball of light both meek and ferocious. Weak certainly, but dangerous, for in spite of it all, it has survived. Secret and lovely and waiting, certain now that it can survive anything. Knowing now that it is, that you are, the brightest star in your constellation.