I remember being a star

I remember the silence of space.

Not the kind you think of, filled with darkness and void, but the kind that pulses with purpose. With gravity. With ancient rhythms and nuclear fire.


I remember being a star.


---


For eons, I watched. I hung suspended in the velvet dark, tethered by gravity and duty. I was one of billions,maybe trillions, glowing in the night sky above your Earth. You never knew me by name. Perhaps you called me Antares, or maybe nothing at all.


Still, I watched you.


Your oceans shimmered like starlight. Your winds whispered in patterns that made my plasma ache. And then, one night, I saw her.


She stood in a meadow, arms outstretched to the sky, laughing beneath my glow like I was something more than heat.


I wanted to understand that laugh.


I wanted to be where she was.


---


So I prayed. Not to matters or time, but to the Architect of motion, the Composer of stars. The god that created us all.


“I am willing,” I whispered into the vacuum, “to die a thousand deaths if it means knowing what it is to feel.”


And the Architect, in all His mercy, replied:


> “Then fall.”


---


I remember falling.


It wasn’t fire. It wasn’t burning. It was unfolding .Like shedding eternity and squeezing into something impossibly small—a body.


Bones. Breath. Blood.


A name: Lucien.


And suddenly, I was there.


Earth.


---


I was confused at first. Light had weight. Air stung my lungs. Time wasn’t fluid—it dragged. Hunger gnawed at me. Emotions—strange chemicals—I had no language for them.


And yet…


The first time I touched water, I wept.


The first time I tasted bread, I laughed.


The first time I held her hand, I forgot the stars.


---


Her name was Eila. She was everything Earth distilled into one being: soft and strong, wild and kind. She taught me how to eat strawberries and lie on grass and chase clouds. She told me stories about god and ghosts, and I told her stories about fusion and nebulae.


She called me “old soul.”

I called her “my miracle.”


She never knew I was once a star.

She just thought I was strange and in love with everything.


She wasn’t wrong.


---


I never told her about the deal.


That to become human was to die human.


No resurrections. No solar rebirths. No nova, no echo. Just…


Silence.


I gave up eternity for a heartbeat of life.


And I was happy.


---


Years passed. I lived slowly. I wrote poems about raindrops. I painted sunrises. I married her. We danced barefoot on riversides and sang lullabies to children we never had. Every night, I looked up at the stars and whispered, “thank you.”


Even when the cough started.


Even when my legs failed.


Even when the doctors used words like "terminal."


---


On the last day, she carried me to the field where we first kissed. The grass was taller now, greener. The wind smelled of rain and lilacs.


“I love you,” she whispered, lying beside me, her fingers intertwined with mine.


And I—barely breath and bone—smiled.


“Did you know,” I whispered, voice thin, “that before I was a man… I was light?”


She laughed through her tears. “Of course you were.”


“I loved you then, too,” I said. “Even before I knew what love was.”


And then…


I closed my eyes.


---

Somewhere far away, a star went dark.


But no one wept.


Because on Earth, in the memory of one woman, and in the whisper of every leaf, and in the warmth of sunlight, he remained.


---


Eila planted a tree where he died.


She named it Lucien.


She said it still glowed sometimes, when the wind was right and the sky was clear.


And people came from all over to sit beneath its branches. To feel something they couldn't name.


---


And if you listen closely, when the night is still and the stars blink gently above, you might hear him whisper:


> “I remember being a star.

> But oh—how I loved being human more.”


---


End.


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