i thought i lost the stars, but i never really had them

it was 3 a.m., and i lay on my back, staring at a sky so black it felt as though the universe had swallowed every trace of light. i’d been awake for hours, chasing sleep like it was something i could wrestle down if i just tried hard enough. instead, all i found was an ever-deepening silence. somewhere between the hours of 2 and 3, i convinced myself that the stars were gone. they’d disappeared, one by one, while i wasn’t paying attention, and now i was alone in this cosmic expanse of darkness.

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that’s how life feels sometimes, doesn’t it? like you’ve lost something monumental, something that should have been yours all along. but what if we never really had the stars in the first place?

when i was younger, i had this tendency to grasp onto things—people, dreams, ideas—with an iron grip. i clung to friendships that had long passed their expiration dates. i held tight to dreams that once lit me up but had since turned to ash. and i kept believing that these things, like the stars in the sky, were supposed to be constant, were meant to be mine. but life, as it often does, has a way of teaching you that not everything you think is yours belongs to you. some things were never meant to be held.

looking back, i see now how much of my life was spent chasing after constellations i couldn’t reach. my hands, outstretched and eager, always seemed to fall short of the stars i thought i was supposed to grab onto. there was this persistent ache that came with it—a sense that if only i were smarter, stronger, or more deserving, i’d finally be able to hold them in my hands.

the truth, though, is that i was trying to claim something that wasn’t mine to begin with. and the stars? they were always up there, shining quietly in the background, indifferent to my frantic reaching.

this realization didn’t hit me all at once. it crept in slowly, like water seeping into a crack in the pavement, eroding away at my illusions bit by bit. i had been so focused on the loss, on the absence of the things i thought i should have had, that i didn’t notice how they had never really belonged to me in the first place. the stars were never mine to hold.

for a long time, i believed that this loss was failure. it’s easy to fall into that trap, to think that the things we lose define us in some way, that they leave behind gaping voids we’re meant to fill with something better. but what if that’s not true? what if the stars—the dreams and the expectations—aren’t something we lose, but something we were never meant to possess in the first place?

i used to dream about being someone who had it all together. someone who could walk through life with a sense of certainty, who could look up at the stars and say, “i know my place in the universe.” but certainty, like stars, is often more illusion than reality. we spend our lives striving for it, thinking that one day we’ll finally reach a place where everything makes sense. but that place doesn’t exist—not really.

if there’s one thing i’ve learned, it’s that the beauty of the stars is in their distance. they’re not something to be possessed, not something to be tamed. they’re there to remind us of the vastness of the universe and of our smallness within it. and in that smallness, there’s a kind of freedom. we don’t have to own the stars to appreciate their light. we don’t have to grasp onto every dream, every person, or every ideal that floats into our lives. sometimes, it’s enough to simply stand back and admire them from afar.

i think a lot about the things i once thought were mine. there was a friendship that felt like it would last forever until it didn’t. there was a career path i swore i’d follow, only to find myself veering off in a completely different direction. there were expectations—of myself, of others, of life—that i clung to, convinced they were the only way forward. but now, standing here, i realize that losing those things wasn’t the tragedy i thought it was. i didn’t lose the stars. i never had them to begin with.

and maybe that’s okay.

in a way, losing the things we never really had can be a relief. it frees us from the weight of expectation, from the burden of trying to hold onto something that was never ours in the first place. it allows us to open our hands, to release the things we’ve been gripping so tightly, and to make space for whatever might come next.

for a long time, i thought that letting go was the same as giving up. i thought that if i stopped reaching for the stars, i was resigning myself to a lesser life, to a life lived in shadow. but now i see that letting go isn’t about giving up. it’s about making peace with the fact that some things aren’t meant to be held. it’s about finding contentment in the spaces between the stars, in the quiet moments of darkness when the sky seems impossibly empty but is still, somehow, full of light.

there’s a certain grace in realizing that we don’t have to own everything we admire. the stars, the dreams, the people we once thought were ours to keep—they all exist in their own right, independent of our need to possess them. and that doesn’t diminish their beauty or their significance. if anything, it makes them more precious.

i think, in the end, we spend too much time worrying about what we don’t have, about the stars we’ve “lost.” but what if, instead of focusing on the absence, we learned to appreciate the presence of what’s still here? the sky is vast and filled with stars, even if we can’t see them all the time. life is vast and filled with opportunities, even if they don’t always appear the way we expect them to. and just because something isn’t ours doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.

i’m learning to let go of the idea that i need to own the stars, that i need to grasp onto everything i want or think i deserve. i’m learning to stand in the stillness, to look up at the sky and marvel at the vastness of it all without needing to claim it as mine.

so maybe i never had the stars, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone. they’re still there, shining quietly in the night, reminding me that sometimes, the most beautiful things are the ones we can’t hold onto.

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