We Were Stars Once

In the beginning, there was only light.

Not the kind that shines through a window or flickers from a candle—but the ancient, burning brilliance that lives at the heart of every star. That’s what we were. Not human, not flesh and bone, but fragments of celestial fire, drifting across the endless tapestry of the cosmos.

We danced—my sisters and I—spiraling through nebulas, brushing against the edges of forming galaxies. We whispered in frequencies no ear could hear, laughed in waves of pure radiation, and shimmered in orbits no planet had yet named. We were eternal. Or so we thought.

But the universe, in all its wisdom, loves change.

One by one, we began to fall. Drawn by a strange tug—gravity, they would call it—we felt ourselves pulled toward a blue world spinning quietly on the edge of a modest galaxy. Earth. The name sounded rough at first, too dense, too cold. But it called to us. It needed us.

The fall was long. We burned through the skies, shedding the last remnants of our astral forms until we emerged in fragile vessels—bodies. Skin, bone, blood. It was a prison, and it was a gift. For the first time, we felt. Wind on cheeks. Tears. Heartbeats. Hunger. Fear. Love.

We were no longer stars, but we carried the memory of what we had been. In our eyes, you could sometimes see it—a flicker of gold, a brief flash of otherworldly light. Some of us became poets. Others, dreamers. A few forgot entirely and lived as mortals, never knowing why they felt so homesick when they looked at the night sky.

I remember the day the last of us arrived. Her name on Earth was Lyra, named after the constellation we once passed through as comets. She fell differently than the others—slower, more deliberate. As if she knew something we didn’t.

“I remember,” she whispered to me one night, our feet in a river, our faces turned to the stars. “I remember what we were meant to do.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, my human voice trembling.

Lyra looked at me, and her eyes burned with the dying light of a thousand galaxies. “This planet is forgetting the stars. We were sent to remind them.”

We tried. Through stories, through art, through music. We wrote myths that shimmered with truths people couldn’t quite grasp. We built monuments that pointed upward. We sent signals into the void. But humanity, distracted by its own noise, began to forget. The stars became decorations. Background. Cold.

And one by one, my sisters dimmed.

Lyra was the last. She refused to fade, even when her body weakened, even when her lungs rattled and her hands shook. She would stand beneath the sky and sing in the old language—waves and frequencies, lost to this world. Sometimes, I thought I heard the stars answer.

When she passed, I was the only one left.

I walk among you now. I have forgotten the names of the constellations, but not the feel of solar winds. I cannot sing in the old frequencies, but I hum softly when I’m alone, hoping some part of me remembers. People call me strange. Distant. They say my eyes seem to stare through things. And maybe they do.

Sometimes, on the clearest nights, I stand barefoot on the grass and whisper, “We were stars once.”

And the wind replies—not with words, but with memory.

Of dancing light. Of spiraling galaxies. Of a purpose not yet fulfilled.

Because I believe—no, I know—that the stars are not done with us. That deep within every soul is a spark waiting to awaken. That some child looking up at the night sky will feel the pull, the memory. And they will understand.

Not with logic. But with awe.

We were stars once.
And maybe… just maybe… we will be again.