We are all Stardust

A sort of a backstory

Life has been life-ing for the last few years, but it was these last few months that almost broke me again. I don’t know if the theme of “Feeling my feelings,” made it obvious or not, but I don’t handle feelings well. I defer to compartmentalization, distraction, and dissociation whenever I feel overburdened or lost. When I don’t know how to cope, how to deal, or where to go, I just stop and instead of doing, I choose to don’t. So, when loss, grief, work, responsibility, fear, and heartache were threatening to drown me, I just stopped and went behind my wall and the only way I could peek out and breathe was when I tried to write. 

I couldn’t be a daughter, and a sister, and a cousin, and an aunt, and a friend, and an employee and still find time to be myself and grieve. Something was going to have to give and since nothing else in my life was giving, I gave up on myself for a bit. Being numb is a practiced work of art, one I haven’t truly trained in a long time, so this time a lot of feelings still bled through and they needed an outlet so I wrote instead. Because I knew that if I started crying, I wouldn’t be able to stop. In fact, the first day that I let myself start crying I almost couldn’t stop, and I could feel the ocean of tears that were sitting behind the wall waiting to pour through. I do not have the time to sort through that deluge as yet. I say all of that to say, that this is a poem written during fresh grief when I couldn’t truly let it out, so I just felt confused and lost and needed to find hope and make sense somehow. I wrote multiple poems that morning, but this one feels like it has the most hope of them all.

The Poem

We are but stardust,
Shifting energy and shattered cosmos that have taken form,
To navigate on this rock to which we randomly fell.
We float aimlessly yet call it living.
We seek substance in the mundane,
Give value to the worthless.
Lie, cheat and steal,
Racing to a finish line that we can all feel,
but can never truly see.
Occasionally,
Rarely,
Fleetingly,
We find solace in the arms of love and hope.
Angels of mercy that take pity on us.
Hold us gently, hoping to remind us of what we have forgotten.
That we are all stardust,
Infinitesimal, but boundless.
Insubstantial, but immense.
Limitless, but flawed.
We are but stardust,
And to dust we shall return.

November 15, 2023