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The world outside held a cold, distant beauty. Like a shadow that can only be lightly described as pitch black. Stripped of color, stripped of warm, it ripples across everything: the night with no dawn, the sky with no sun or moon.
This eternal night seems to stretch forever in darkness, an unwavering void of cold and lifelessness. Yet this shadow is the origin of all life. From its darkness is the birth of dawn, the tears of rain, the smell of flowers, and the whisper of a breeze.
From the shadows are these faint kisses of life whispers. Cutting out of this night is its far away warmth. From the darkness beauty emerges.
Stars. Many things will change in the universe, but the stars seem eternal, immortal.
They sparkled like morning dew caught in the light. Within them there’s a secret glimmer, a teasing whisper of existence beyond the universe the humans of Earth know.
Thousands of galaxies promising billions of lives some light years away wink perpetually at him. These faint glimmers of the majesty of life afar seem minute, like microorganisms under a microscope. They’re specks of dust weaving in a galactic wind.
Yet each speck of dust represents something far greater. Within each blink is the sigh of life, the laughter of a child, the cool downpour of rain. Within in each glimmer is the taste of love, the crisp breeze of spring, the smell of dirt, the taste of air. And within each wink are hope, death, and the happiness of a family.
It’s difficult to imagine such beauty and emotion when they’re so distant, aloof even. The humans seem to look at the sky and see only stars; they seem to little imagine the vastness of the many species and lives beyond. They see only the stars in the night sky. He sees the wonder of something far greater, the curious knowledge of life beyond.
To him each star is a pearl in a great ocean, an illumination of the lost and found. Space may be of such darkness, but it takes night to see the day. It takes the sun to see the moon. It takes death to know life and hello to say goodbye.
Goodbye.
It’s a difficult word for him to swallow. There are too many memories strung within a survivor’s heart, too many caught tears, too many false hopes. He hides his pain and loneliness among those stars. He casts his broken wings into the celestial wind, mourning the everlasting memory of a home no longer his.
When he closes his eyes, he can still hear their screams, see the fear, and smell the blood. He’d watched the Martian civilization fall, watched the annihilation of a race. When the bloodshed had ended, he was left with nothing by a garden of remembrance, a cemetery.
The planet he once knew is nothing but blood and ashes. The only memories of his life are rubble, ruin, and memory. There can be no echoes of hope, no solace. That world has fallen. There are only dreams, dreams of a world he can no longer touch, people he can no longer walk among.
Into that flickering void of space, he’s whispers a quiet elegy. He is the survivor. Or perhaps he is the cursed. To live in such an enormous, beautiful world filled with such pain and loneliness is a desolate fate.