It is not, truly, the descent—that tired, theatrical relinquishing of the sun—nor the facile promise of the next day’s glare that hushes the quivering, low-toned animal that is my insecurity when the darkness takes hold. No. It is the moon. Always the moon.

A sphere suspended—a brilliant, horrifying forgiveness—glowing with a detachment that is the only true salvation. Thank God the stars, those pinpricks of icy indifference, possess no faculty of judgment. They do not register the trivial, feverish evils we manage beneath their vast and ignorant names; they do not see.

There is nothing, you must understand, so agonizingly imperfect as this sticky, pulsing condition of being human. Tell me, then, tell me with the simple cruelty of truth that I am beautiful. Say that my eyes still possess some raw, moist luminosity despite the grinding weight and the heavy, black flour of the night.

And then I shall love you. Not with a fragile, mortal tenderness, but with the consuming, chaotic fire of a thousand suns—all heat and terrifying collapse. I will love you with the ancient, unmoving patience of Orion, and with the ultimate, hollow tolerance of the moon.

©️Beatriz Esmer