Sneeze+2

When I think about outer space, I think of how amazingly massive everything there is, and how different everything is from anything we have here. In particular, I think about how far away we are from everything out there. I feel like receiving light from faraway stars is like receiving letters from people who are very far away. There's that delay between when they actually send the letter, send the light, and when you get it. Stars are so far away that we are only just getting the light that they sent millions of billions of years ago. It's kind of scary. You're getting a constant flow of letters from that person who's so far away, but the delay is so much that even though the letter that you hold in your hand says that your friend is alive, they could be long dead by now. And you'll only know when the letters stop coming, and that could be ages from now. You might live your whole life thinking that one star is alive, still burning bright and shining in some far off place in the depths of the universe, but it's actually dead. What's even scarier is that every star, no matter how bright they are shining, or were shining, will eventually die. Most people don't think about stars that way. They think that they're permanent, that they'll be there forever. But forever is relative. Does it not matter if the star is dead if you're dead, too? I think most people don't think about these things. Most people seem to think that the stars will be there forever, but they won't. They'll be gone someday, and we'll have heard about it a million years late. I think it's kind of sad to think that we won't know whether a star is alive or not. People wished on dead stars, people named stars long gone, people pointed out bright specks that already went out. The letter you hold in your hand doesn't prove anything. Sure, the star was alive a million years in the past, but what about now? I'd like to know if my star is still alive. I had a dream about space. It involved giant, graceful moths that flew through space searching for a distant star and a planet on which to lay their eggs. They flew through the blackness on their velvety wings, the soft felt rippling in a solar wind. The stripes and huge rings of violet and indigo, yellow and white spanned wings miles across. Iridescent multi-faceted eyes glinted in distant starlight, emerald and turquoise, black and royal purple. It slowly made its way through the night, weaving and swooping in endless space. It rolled and spun through stardust, and grazed over icy rings spinning around rainbow-sherbet planets. Finally it met a group of other giant space moths, and it turned its graceful head to gaze upon the others, then continuing on its way, searching for a distant star. Quiet grace and determination drove the moths through infinite space, until they came upon the blazing light of a star. The warmth of the star engulfed the moth, and its wings flexed and stretched in the glow, then arcing away to find a pale gray planet, where it rotated around and around, slowly making its way onto the the surface, settling down. The deed done, it lifted up clouds of dust as it flapped its graceful wings and took off, flying away into infinity, disappearing after a while into the blackness, to search for another star.