The Stars That We Lost To The City

We used to lie down on our backs in the unkempt lawn behind your bungalow, and gaze at the stars when we were fifteen. Fifteen years later, we find ourselves watching crowds from fifteenth floor windows. We categorize the hairy and the hairless into neat boxes, traced with all twenty of our fingers in the evening air that get entangled trying to count and calculate these mortal patterns that we see on the masks. We wonder if the faces beneath are celebrating or questioning how our lives are getting a little worse with each passing leap year. Once, we debated if time heals, or simple despair does. We went into our hearts, with all twenty of our fingers and untied the knots just in time. No one wants the agonies flooding our city’s slippery streets again. We’d rather take death in little daily doses, and let it trickle past the walls of the esophagus. It’s like liquid lava that erupted without a notice and now wants to make a mark on the ruptured ground, before drying up into a rock itself. But when death has seeped deep into the bone marrow of the living, polluting the veins, arteries, nerves and organs irrevocably, we turn back to take one last look at the happy children on the unkempt lawn, who plucked the stars out of the sky and then, blindfolded each other. The lyrical madness of youth engulfed us and now we can’t find the stardust that we had so carelessly discarded as waste.