Star Life

Stars form out of giant clouds of dust and gas in space. Something disturbs the cloud, maybe a wind of particles from a nearby star or the shock wave from a supernova, and the cloud collapses and when gravity and the internal pressure from the compressed gas learn to get along and balance one another, a star is born. Like anything that spins in space, the newborn star has an accretion disk, a swirling ring of gases and dust that gets pulled into the star or thrown out into space by the twin jets coming from the poles of the star. Clearly, young stars are equivalent to elementary school girls, twirling with tutus or hula hoops, spinning with their arms above their heads and their feet dancing on the ground. It must be quite the sight to see, these huge amorphous clouds beginning to dance over millions of years. Stars never do anything too quickly.

But stars form in these huge clouds of dust, right? The clouds block out most of our attempts to see the stars- the dark patches in the Milky Way in our nighttime sky are dust lanes. The Orion Nebula is a stellar nursery. But we can't see inside these clouds and in a field of science where the only information you get is light, seeing is crucial. So we scan the spectrum and hypothesize, but new stars aren't perfectly understood, especially the first new stars. Astronomers used to think that all of the first stars in the universe were giant stars, hundreds of times the size of our Sun. The bigger the star is, the faster it lives its life. Bright blue giant stars, like the brightest of the Pleiades or Sirius, may outshine something smaller and average, but their life will end sooner and more explosively than the smaller stars who will patiently shine, grow, sigh and fade as the millenniums pass by.

But these first stars, these bright bright giants that first let light into the Universe, we had always thought that these stars had formed alone, sowing the cold of space with their seeds of oxygen and carbon to make the battle between gravity and thermal pressure easier for the stars that came afterwords. Now, there's an idea that they may have formed with low mass companions, smaller stars collapsing out of the giant's accretion disk, living on for much longer and giving us hints about the early universe. The great thing about astronomy is that the farther away you look, the farther back in time you get to see. The most distant things we've detected are also the earliest. Seeing gamma rays from these earliest stars could give us hints about how galaxies form, snapshots from the childhood scrapbooks of the Universe.

Can you imagine being one of those stars, though? You spend your entire life revolving around this huge star that dies and leaves you to wait out the long lonely days of your life in the cold of space. You stay there and shine until there is absolutely nothing left that you can do and you peacefully send out the last rays you have to give. You are left to linger, to point the way to something bigger, and your last effort is to tell a story that is not yours, to smile as you pass on the information that another will need to better understand the beauty around him. To such a tiny other, with such a short life! Can you imagine?

Stars are so much more patient than me, so much more kind. They shine indiscriminately. They stay there, to help generations tell the stories, to remind us that we're connected, that we're small, that we're loved. I feel like the background character in my own life, waiting for happiness to happen to me. Stars don't get to choose- they take the mass, the elements, the space that is given to them and they do as they're supposed to do. They move according to their laws, they live and die according to their prescribed times and when they complain or throw a last, final tantrum, we're left with a stunning picture of their mess. Even in destruction, they're beautiful. But us, we're impulsive. We have these emotions, this free will, this real sense of life. Our days are so short and we get to choose and so we do. We reach for things we wouldn't normally reach for, if we were given billions of years to make our choices. Just because I can live without something doesn't mean that I want to- I want try many things, feel many things, step out of this cloud that I live in and say many things. Give me a shot. Let me live and in so living, let me shine. I already point to Someone brighter than me.

I Thought I Might Be Wrong...

Someone needs to tell my emotions to cool it. I just got out of a long-term crush (I would tell him if I thought he'd listen) with the help of a rebound crush (I wouldn't tell him unless my integrity depended on it). Bear in mind that crushes are the closest things I've got to relationships. They're safest, closest to my bubble and inside the door to this strong room that I never willingly step out of. It's the weirdest thing, though- I've been carrying around this boy in my heart for the longest time and then he was thrown out like a song I've listened to too often or a movie I've watched too much. Then, with this other one, I got all giggly and dumb and happy and thought for sure this one was going places. Of course, I was a little crushed when it wasn't. And it's certainly my own fault for thinking that I had something here, proof of the fool that I can often be.

I love driving. I can turn up my music ridiculously loud and sing along and there ain't no one to judge except at the occasional awkward stoplight. Recently, this has consisted of Pretty Girl From Cedar Lane by The Avett Brothers loud and often on repeat. One time or another, listening through again, I realized that I had had a moment, and that moment was gone and that's fine.It's fine. And that, realizing that, is like coming up gasping for breath after being underwater too long or singing 'til you can't push another molecule of air from your diaphragm. It's a beautiful, beautiful feeling, being free.

And you know, I have depended for so long on the wrong perspective to make me feel right, to make me feel beautiful and wonderful and appreciated. Sometimes you just can't help but feel like less of a human being if you've had the epic lack of a love life that I've had. No, legitimately, if you can't find some boy who actually likes you by this age, you have to be doing something wrong, right? Yeah, screw that. I have a group of about 50 people who are willing to tell me at the drop of a hat that I am beautiful and I'm going to start believing them.

Because I want to live, so badly. I want to fly. I want to keep my head in the stars and never let anything pull me back down. And I think we spend so much time on this romantic love and finding our worth only when we find the one that we miss out on the everyday love that surrounds us and protects us. I want so badly to have this tangible love, the kind that you can hold in your hand or let slip through your fingers, the kind that binds you to a person like nothing else, the kind that you give, you hold out to them with tired arms and shaking shoulders, never wanting to let go. But I know that there's so much more to life than that, so many different ways you can give your love until it's gone. You can live and move and breathe without that one someone to tell you that you're worth the air that your lungs are stealing.

So I will not be heartbroken simply because I am not loved in the way the world wants me to be. I have these wonderful, beautiful sisters and friends who never fail to remind me of the huge number of good things in the world. There is Good, and it's going to win, and I am happy to love that, to work for it and hope for it and spend my nights singing from the rooftops instead of waiting on them. For once.

My Difficulties (Or, A Vote of Confidence)

You know what my problem is? I'm always going to believe the best in people. That's my problem.

I am never going to give up on someone I know. I'm never going to believe that their heart isn't in the right place. I'm always going to assume that they are trying their hardest, and if they're not, that there's a legit reason why they aren't. I am going to take them at their word, because I trust people. I am always going to hope that they're going to do what they say they're going to and be the people that they say they're going to be. I am always going to believe that their hearts beat with honesty and love.

You know why? Because I can't take a world where people don't do that. Because I know you, because I hear your story, because I listen and because I believe that you are good and wonderful and better than you believe. I can't understand why someone wouldn't give their best, so they must have a reason. I can't believe that someone would treat someone badly just out of spite- there must be some anger, frustration, some other care that stops them from being the person they can be. It breaks my heart to see people ill-treated and it shatters it when I can't do anything about it. But the worst is when I can and don't.

I can explain my actions away all day and be kept in perpetual remembrance of my sins with a thousand words to blot them out. I can use every talent I've been gifted with to block out all of my problems, or pour them out like so many emptying bottles, but at the end of it all, all the efforts and explanations that drain me until my heart is too tired to beat, all I truly own is this stupid, brainless hope that tomorrow won't be like that. Tomorrow, the misunderstandings don't take over everything. Tomorrow, everyone understands and no one cries. Tomorrow, everything makes sense. Tomorrow, I stand up and I make the right decision. Tomorrow, there will be less pain than there was today, because tomorrow is when right has the opportunity to win.

And I will always believe in grace. There will always be a second chance, if it's mine to give. I might live the rest of my life being disappointed and I might lose as often as I'm disappointed. I might cry every night until my pillow cannot dry over the things that break me down day by day. I might spend all my days wondering why I ever hoped for something better.

Or I might not.



And I'd rather believe in that.