No one is watching.
The stars, cold witnesses to nothing,
burn without concern for what I do
with this fragile breath I call mine.
I was not summoned.
I arrived by chance,
a ripple in carbon,
a brief arrangement of dust learning how to ache.
There is no ledger,
no cosmic tally of wrongs,
only the mirror—
and it does not judge,
only reflects.
I have knelt—not in prayer,
but in the quiet aftermath of my own choices.
When I lied. When I touched with care.
When I left bread
on the steps of someone else’s hunger.
Morality,
they say,
is scaffolded by sky.
But what if it blooms instead
in the marrow of uncertainty?
In the simple refusal
to become a blade
when you could be
a balm?
I have kissed under galaxies
older than our oldest sins,
held hands with someone
and felt, for one trembling instant,
the infinite compress into
a single pulse
of warmth.
I do not need to be eternal
to be kind.
I do not need to be watched
to be good.
The silence of the stars
does not condemn me—
it frees me
to build fire
where the dark
would otherwise devour.
And maybe that is enough:
to be a soft defiance
against the void,
a brief, luminous contradiction
etched in the quiet geometry
of being.