I want you to know that I have wished upon every single celestial body that has hurled itself through the atmosphere before my hazel eyes while I’ve put a kink in my neck staring up. 

If the dreams that I’ve so carelessly hurled at those passing flashes had physical form, I’m certain they would block out the sun over whatever corresponding, unlucky patch of the planet I happen to be aimlessly wandering through at any given moment. I can’t think of what else they could possibly be.

On the positive side, probably no one who stayed around me would get skin cancer. Silver linings, you know. I mean, what else could you really ask for?

But here’s the thing: None of them have ever come true. 

Not a single one of those careless whispers of my desires up into the cosmic abyss above our heads has ever resulted in any form of divine intervention. They’ve all been prayers to a dispassionate god who’s tired of playing with the particular set of his toys that contains me. 

Alexander Pope was wrong, after all. Not every prayer is accepted. 

Yet, I still do it. 

That’s my immensely embarrassing and confusing confession to make to you, my friend. 

I still look up when I notice something sprinting instead of listing lazily through the sky. I still feel my heart forget the scar tissue that now holds together its shape and utter the same plea to that deaf deity somewhere up there, my lips carrying through on its wants almost involuntarily. 

And after all of these years, I think I have an idea what it is. 

The human experience leaves us constantly in positions of having no real move to get what we desire. Each individual of our species is competing with billions of others for the same conservative cache of happiness left behind before whoever created us abandoned us to our own mess. 

In that race, often, there will be nothing you can do, except feel that burning in your chest — the one that stays consistently at the same heat, too busy to raise the temperature a beat as if it’s suddenly too wrapped up in its own dreams of autonomous electric sheep. 

But, it has no outlet. 

Well, it has no appropriate outlet. 

You could just scream it out. 

You could drink it away and end up drunk dialing a whole bunch of people, saying a plethora of problematic strings of words that will force you to avoid talking to those same acquaintances for months. 

You could let it make you angry and become one of those hurt people who hurt people. 

You could give up. 

Or. 

You could be a fool like me. 

And the next time you see some comet blazing its trail across the night sky, you could let go of it; let yourself breathe that fire into sounds that you carefully confess into that incalculable and somehow ever-growing expanse that illuminates and darkens our existence. 

No, I’m not going to tell you that any of it is ever going to come true. 

But, frankly, what else can we do?

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