Amongst Crows and Constellations

 

Tonight, I found myself at the window again, as if I had been summoned. I never seem to choose the night; it chooses me. The glass cool beneath my fingertips, the house asleep behind me, I stand there like a quiet voyeur, stealing glances at the stars as though they are writing secret letters meant only for those patient enough to read them.

The moon knows me by name.

I have spoken to her so many evenings that I no longer expect an answer in words. She replies in silver, in shadows stretched long across the yard, in the slow drift of clouds that arrive like old thoughts returning home. She has watched me become every version of myself—girl, woman, dreamer, ghost—and never once asked me to be anything different.

The crows understand this too.

By daylight they are clever little anarchists, but at dusk they become priests dressed in black velvet, carrying ancient sermons between the trees. I imagine myself wandering beside them through forgotten fields where no roads remain, our conversation held in glances instead of language. They never ask where I have been. They simply fall into step beside me as though I have always belonged to their congregation.

Perhaps I have.

There are people who belong to mornings with their bright certainty and clean beginnings. I have never envied them. My heart has always preferred the hour when the edges of things soften, when fences disappear into blue shadows and every ordinary tree remembers it was once part of a fairy tale.

The night and I are old friends.

Not the kind who need entertaining, nor the kind who fill silence with needless conversation. We sit together comfortably, wrapped in the same dark shawl, remembering lives we never lived and places we somehow miss. She keeps my secrets folded between constellations. I leave little pieces of myself scattered among her stars.

Sometimes I wonder if that is why I never feel entirely lonely beneath the moon.

The darkness does not empty the world; it reveals it. It strips away the noise until only the truest things remain: the breathing of the earth, the distant call of unseen wings, the perfume of damp grass, the patient glow of a thousand lights burning from impossibly far away.

When everyone else closes their curtains, I open mine.

I return to my post at the window, faithful as a lighthouse keeper, watching the heavens drift slowly overhead. Not because I am searching for answers, but because I have the quiet suspicion that I was made from the same ancient blue as midnight itself.

And every evening, when the first star appears, it feels less like a beginning than a homecoming.