Stardust

By Fauxx

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In ships, they would turn off the lights at night on the bridge, the place where the captain navigates. That’s why the whole place is usually dark. Being a young boy then, I thought, “Why would anybody turn the lights off and grope in the dark while you navigate a huge ship?”

Is that faith?

Not really. But I learned that one of the reasons is for the crew to see other ships ahead with their lights, or the lighthouses, so they know how far away the land is. The darker it becomes, the brighter the lights.

The clearer it is to know where the ship is and where it is going.

There is a nugget of wisdom from that. Especially when you are cruising in the darkest moments of your journey.

Also, If you ever find yourself in a ship at night time, go to that dark place and try to look up. On a cloudless sky, you will see stars. It is vastly different from the stars and the sky we have in the city. The city has gone too bright and it kills the light of the faintest of stars.

At sea, these specks of light, the brightest and the less conspicuous, literally twinkle; and are literally innumerable. At that moment the twinkling star concept comes out of the metaphor of books and hallmark cards and you realize their meaning.

Somehow you would begin to understand why people in the ancient times marvel at the celestial sky. This is one of the reason why I enjoy travelling by sea and maybe the reason still why people then didn’t need a TV.

Do you know that even though light travels at the fastest immeasurable speed humans have speculated, it would still take millions of years for the light of the nearest stars to reach our planet?

Think about it, even if one star changes from supernova to white dwarf, (feel free to correct my literal astronomical lapses) it would take many years for us to see it. The very stars that we may be looking at right now may have been long gone many million years ago… they are just bright phantoms of their glorious shining moments.

And technically, when we gaze up, we are looking back in time.

Time.

Short of being true or otherwise, I dread the upcoming days.

I do not intend to go back in time, but I do want it to freeze… even for a moment. And breathe in each second. Maybe make something out of them, like what people did with the stars. Map out my own constellations from the stars of distant past memories and moments. And maybe take a souvenir from each.

Everything was made beautiful. Fearfully and wonderfully made, one way or another.

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Stardust originated from stars like a souvenir from what they might have been before. But in the end, gathering stardust is still gathering dust.

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The guy who illegally owned the name Fauxx is the author of the unpublished psychograph. He sprinkles courage to other players when playing Bluff, a card game. While I am the literary editor of our Filipino newspaper back in high school, Fauxx is one of the editors in our English Newspaper 😀