The Last Spark in the Dark

I once held a sky full of stars in my hands,

soft, trembling, shy,

as if the universe had trusted me with its dreams,

with its quiet hopes for tomorrow.

I cupped them close, breathed on them gently,

watched them flicker gold against my palms.

I made wishes I was too afraid to say aloud,

and promises I never learned how to keep.

But time —

time is a river that drags everything away:

stones, songs, footsteps, prayers.

And one by one, the stars slipped through my fingers,

turning to cold ash on the wind.

I called after them, a hundred times,

in every language I knew:

of joy, of regret, of desperation,

but they did not turn back.

The night grew heavier without them,

pressing against my skin like wet cloth.

The air thickened with a silence so deep

it drowned out even the beating of my heart.

Where light had once danced,

only memories stumbled now,

half-formed, half-forgotten,

weaving broken patterns into the dark.

I remembered your laughter —

not the way it sounded,

but the way it felt:

like the first warm day after a cruel winter,

like honey spilled across stone.

I remembered your hands —

not their shape,

but their certainty,

the way they tethered me to this trembling earth

when everything else wanted to fly away.

I remembered your goodbye —

not the words,

but the space they left behind,

a hollow echo that never stops reverberating.

Somewhere between the ticking clocks and wilting flowers,

I began to forget who I was without the light.

Grief blurred the edges of my reflection,

until even the mirror looked away in shame.

I wandered through days made of fog,

through nights that bit at my heels with wolf’s teeth.

Each sunrise was a cruel joke,

each sunset a slow bleeding into black.

I built temples of loneliness,

monuments to all the things I lost,

and worshiped at the altar of what could have been.

People said,

"Time heals all wounds,"

as if time were a doctor with gentle hands,

not a thief that steals and steals

until you forget what it felt like to be whole.

They said,

"You’ll find the light again."

But they didn’t see that the stars had gone deaf,

the sky had grown blind,

and even hope had packed its bags and left me in the rubble.

Still —

still —

there were nights I thought I heard a star whisper,

just beyond the edge of dreaming.

A soft hum, like a forgotten lullaby,

calling me back from the abyss.

There were mornings when the dew clung to the grass

like tiny jewels,

and the wind smelled faintly of beginnings.

There were moments — fleeting, trembling —

where a hand brushed mine,

a bird sang too sweetly,

a child laughed too brightly,

and something inside me flickered.

Not a star.

Not yet.

But a spark.

A stubborn, foolish spark,

too small to see,

too loud to ignore.

I tended it carefully,

with cracked hands and a heart stitched together

from memories and broken promises.

I fed it stories of what I had loved,

sang to it songs of what I had lost.

I shielded it from the wind of sorrow,

from the rains of forgetting.

And one evening,

as I stood alone in the hollow field of my past,

I looked up —

and there it was.

Not the sky full of stars I once held,

no —

but one single light, trembling and stubborn,

blinking through the thickest dark.

It was not what I had before.

It was not enough to make me whole.

But it was a beginning.

And sometimes,

one stubborn spark

is all it takes

to teach the stars how to shine again.