Aeschylus.

There was a time of younger blood and timeless hearts and stupid-thinking thoughts that you were the only star: a single beacon in the lost night I was allowed to witness. I believed it was you who were the one: the defining color in a colorless world with a history and future equally tainted with death — death and the pain of those that must continue even knowing what we must never know, if we are to live as hopeful as we once were and might never be again.

The star was there, the lost night found — palm down, pages of God, my only testimony. The what is given freely but never why, never how. Perhaps everything I see with my heart’s eye, looked at closely enough, becomes brighter. Or is it me in that sky? Myself forever saving myself.

Freewill lives in my pockets, spilling out: ask, deliberate, consider, speak; step left or right; catch or fall; save or drown; love or bloody fists. But choice is not control. That’s the illusion.

Beauty does not come from nothingness, whole from broken, or light from dark. If I am one, I cannot be both. If I am both, I would never be only one. If I was the star, I would not need to see the star. I am the darkness of night, hungry for a single sparkler. Looking to you for the answers, seeing myself as the solution, means I’m asking the wrong question, solving the wrong problem.

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio.

It’s Aristotle’s soul, Lucretius’s swerve, the wind hovering over the water. Paul tried to tell us: the beginning and the end. The beginning is the end. There are only beginnings. The lost sheep is a coin finally found, finally landed, finally home.