Obviously,....

(she said) regrets come back to haunt most any and sometimes every night.

But, tonight, for the first time--since I can't remember when--I saw the stars and, what is more, some of the everlasting constellations. The first was Cassiopeia. Then, Orion came springing over the tennis fence, running to defend the Seven Sisters (of whom the seventh still hid behind one of her sisters). Seeking to reorient my senses--as if that would translate to an existential adjustment--I scanned back for the North Pole. But since I could only find Cassiopeia (the Big Dipper was too low in the lights and haze of a corrupt city), I could, not surprisingly, only guess as which was Polaris. My guess was good, I am sure. There were not a lot of choices after all.

The night sky is only so satisfactory here, in this big metropolis. --How can one ever be satisfied with a dull, fuzzy and distant apparition when one has seen it face to face, where the twinkling tickled and the Milky Way glows luminiscent. Where the blackness is dangerously close to being violated and torn through with piercing, hard little lights. It gives one the hope of a damascusian road experience. But it never comes.

If stars were, as the story goes, God's manifold and rich blessings suddenly, because of our sin, arrested to be suspended for an eternity above us and forever out of reach, they are hard. And God harder. And falling stars less a promise of dreams coming true and more like a sadistic tease of what could have been ours.

Yet, I have never beheld, gazed and drank upon them in that way. Experience can't be wrong, can it?

A little less hard. And little more kin, please.