Sometimes I think I can see the stars in the daytime. 

They can be hard to see in the suburbs even at night, hidden behind clouds and light pollution that make the constellations dull and airplanes brighter than the trillions of suns that humanity has so long given so much meaning to. It saddens me that we must strain to see the stars – and that, sometimes, we cannot see them at all. 

Sometimes, I think I can see the stars in the daytime. Sometimes, I will get a glimpse of an adoration so bright, a love so strong, that a person appears to be a planet revolving around a sun only they can see. It’s in the eyes, anyway – twinkling that you can only really view from up close. Brown, green, blue, reflecting light that should not be there and that has no source. 

I think that kind of love is the most obvious. Sometimes, I look at the way a person looks at another, and I wonder how on earth the latter does not know their luminosity in the gaze of the former. Sometimes, the stars are so bright that they are impossible to ignore to anyone except for the star themself.  

I have shielded myself from the stars. If you look away, down at the ground, then the stars will not be so bright. They will not be brilliant if you do not allow them to be, and you will not be blinded if you do not stare directly into them. This is the way I have learned to live, and it is the way I have kept on for so very long without feeling the light-headed giddiness of a planet stuck in orbit.  

There are no stars in grass and concrete. There are no stars in textbooks and ink, and there are no stars in my own hands typing on a keyboard.  

But one day, I slipped. A voice called my name, and I looked up expecting another, and instead it was you. An unassuming glance, a muttered favor, and I was no longer looking at the ground. I was looking at you. 

It was fine, I told myself. There were no stars, and I was all right. I looked at you the same way I was able to look at my friends, and I told myself that the stars only ever came out at night. I could not see the twinkle in my own eye, because I did not realize that –  

Those who see stars in the daytime hardly realize they are being blinded until it is already far too late. Who would willingly choose their own demise if they knew that they were staring into a source of light so bitingly radiant?  

I did not see the stars in the daytime. I only saw you, and I continued to look and tell myself it was fine because I was not blind yet. What could it hurt, to peer across at another, so funny and genuine? I was not hurt. I was not hurting. 

Everything became brighter with you by my side. Tedious minutes spent studying or walking in the frigid cold of a cloudy winter became well-spent because you were there, playing games we made up and making jokes only we understood. You were a friend to me, and I said I was fine, even though the hues became more vivid when you were near and seemed duller when you said goodbye. We have spent so much time together doing things that are all too normal, and yet they seem to radiate an energy that I have only ever seen replicated in the triangle rays of the sun from childhood drawings.  

I did not see the stars in my eyes, but my friends did. I no longer looked at the ground but at you, because you were safe and bright, and I felt warm in your presence. I smiled more easily, and one asked me – Do you realize the way you look at him? 

There were stars reflected in my eyes, ones I could not see because I only ever wanted to look at you when you were around. I told myself it was fine. It was a small thing, my temporary blindness. 

I have never gotten over it. There is no sensation that can compensate for the brilliance of your gaze or the shine of your laugh. The sun feels cold compared to the warmth of your embrace, and for some time now I have been afraid of the day I lose the star and am left in my own cold dimness once more. How could a star shine for a person who cannot radiate their own light? 

But perhaps you are not a star. Or perhaps I am a star to you. Perhaps we are both stars to each other, or perhaps we are two people who have looked at one another too long and told one another too much and thought of one another in a way that crept too far past grass and concrete. 

I remember that cloudy night under the moon. I remember the wind in my hair and how cold it was outside the warmth of my car. I remember the music that played from inside the open door, and I remember the way you held my arms when I tried to turn away and the way you looked down at me with a plea in your gaze. I remember turning back to you, and  

I saw the stars in your eyes. 

But you weren’t looking at the sky. 

You were looking at me. 

I have not turned away since.