I remember when I asked you to watch the stars, falling, gently, across the sky with me. Here, it’s easier to make them out, even with the handy iPhone app; the city lights are not detrimental to the glow of Jupiter, the winking of Venus. It’s the perfect blend of technology and the past, the old with the new, the time travel I always imagined would become a reality. Not in this lifetime. That’s something I’m slowly starting to accept.

But you understand that while we watch the stars and look back, it’s only for a moment that this nostalgia settles around the heart. Sometimes, I don’t like being reminded of parts of my past, for they can be the the cracks across this eggshell-thin human exterior. Some are still firm, others are weaker. Yet that is who I am, and I am glad that no one is going to try and repair me. I’d rather be fused together with a light from within, made of the same particles that emanate from the stars, the same atoms and ions that I see when I look into your eyes.

It is said that the sound of “om” marked the beginning of the universe; it’s a living, breathing, pulsing energy. I expressed in front of many gathered, for love, that “energy cannot be created or destroyed, it only changes from one form to another.” That energy will never die, so I remember it close, near my heart. We’re all stories and memories and some form of atoms flying around in the end, after all. So while I can, I will tell those stories, express those experiences, and learn to accept what is, and what is not.

I will always look up at the stars, and hold your hand, even when you’re not with me. I and they and you and everything is one and the same, part of each other. “We are stardust, we are golden.” And after all, there is only love.