The Infinite Starr

Everybody is willing to hate you until they need you again by then the relationship has changed.

Not ended.

Changed.

There is a difference.

Endings have funerals.

Flowers.

Black dresses.

Dirt thrown over something everyone has agreed is dead.

Change is crueler.

Change leaves the body sitting at the dinner table.

It lets the conversation continue.

It lets the phone ring.

It lets someone knock on the door believing the same person who answered in 2017 still lives there.

She doesn’t.

That is the price you pay when you think people are the commodity.

People get strange when they believe there will always be another human standing behind the one they just destroyed.

Another friend.

Another lover.

Another employee.

Another person willing to answer the phone at 10:47 at night because suddenly the emergency has become important enough to remember their name.

People spend people carelessly when they believe the supply is infinite.

Then one day they reach into their pocket and discover they are broke.

Funny how that works.

But today felt familiar.

Not emotionally familiar.

Older than that.

The kind of familiar you feel when you walk into a room you’ve never entered and somehow know where the light switch is.

Something had returned.

I couldn’t place it at first.

The conversations were strange.

Old names surfaced.

People behaved like younger versions of themselves.

Situations I could have sworn had been buried years ago suddenly crawled out of the ground wearing new clothes.

Even the air felt recycled.

Then I looked up.

The planets had returned to the same alignment they held in 2017.

There it was.

The sky had put an old record back on the turntable.

Same positions.

Different year.

Same song.

Different dancers.

So what were you doing in 2017?

Put it on repeat.

Where were you?

Who were you loving?

Who were you fighting?

Who had access to you?

Who were you desperately trying to convince of something you no longer give a shit whether they understand?

Who were you before everything happened?

More importantly, who was standing beside you?

Because apparently the universe keeps records too.

Maybe better ones than we do.

There was an old house at the end of a street I used to imagine belonged to everyone who had ever mistaken kindness for weakness.

It wasn’t abandoned.

That would have made it less interesting.

Someone kept the lights on.

Every evening, exactly at dusk, the lamps behind the curtains flickered awake one by one.

The porch light.

The upstairs bedroom.

The little lamp beside the window.

But nobody ever came outside.

People said a woman lived there.

Of course they did.

Every good story eventually blames a woman.

They said she kept records.

Not journals.

Not photographs.

Not revenge lists hidden beneath the floorboards with names written in red ink.

Nothing so dramatic.

She simply remembered.

Everything.

The exact tone.

The exact sentence.

The exact day.

The moment someone’s face changed when they decided she was no longer useful.

The silence afterward.

Especially the silence.

People like me don’t hold grudges.

We remember everything.

There is a difference.

A grudge wants revenge.

Memory wants accuracy.

And accuracy is terrifying to people who have rewritten history enough times to make themselves innocent.

They return years later carrying their revised editions.

They knock softly.

Smile.

Act surprised that the furniture has moved.

They begin sentences with things like,

I don’t remember it happening that way.

Of course you don’t.

Your version lets you sleep.

Mine remembers being awake.

Maybe that’s why 2017 mattered.

Not because it was particularly magical.

It wasn’t.

There were ordinary mornings.

Bills.

Traffic.

Bad coffee.

People saying things they would later swear they never said.

There were endings nobody recognized as endings because everyone assumed there would be another conversation.

Another chance.

Another year.

And perhaps that’s the cruelest trick time plays.

It doesn’t announce the last time.

There is no bell.

No warning.

No little man standing beside you whispering:

Pay attention. You’re never going to stand here with this person like this again.

Life just moves.

Then nine years later the heavens arrange themselves exactly as they did before and suddenly you are staring at an old doorway wondering why you recognize the room.

The sky remembers.

The body remembers.

The house remembers.

And unfortunately for some people, so do I.

But remembering isn’t the same as returning.

That’s where people get confused.

What you should have let go of extracts from your hands today.

Eventually everything collects interest.

Especially pain.

Especially resentment.

Especially the things we insist we are over while dragging their corpses behind us.

There is something almost romantic about suffering when you have carried it long enough.

You decorate it.

Name it.

Give it a room.

Light candles around it.

Visit it when you’re lonely.

Tell yourself you are remembering when really you are worshiping.

That’s the dangerous part.

Because eventually the ghost starts believing it still lives there.

So open the window.

Don’t look twice.

Don’t think about it.

Scream to the sky and let it go.

Scream until the birds leave the trees.

Until the clouds have heard your side of the story.

Until every sentence you never said leaves your throat and disappears somewhere above the rooftops.

But you must let it go.

Not forgive it.

Not excuse it.

Not pretend it didn’t happen.

Let it go.

There are things we release because they deserve forgiveness.

There are other things we release because they have already stolen enough fucking time.

Those are not the same thing.

And somewhere along the way we confused healing with amnesia.

As if becoming whole requires forgetting who broke the glass.

No.

You can sweep the floor and still remember who threw the stone.

You can rebuild the house and never hand them another key.

You can wish someone well from a distance so enormous even God would need binoculars.

That isn’t bitterness.

That’s architecture.

Boundaries are just doors we finally learned how to lock.

Careful what you say today because tomorrow never signed anything promising you access to the person you’re hurting today.

People love believing tomorrow comes with a reset button.

It doesn’t.

Tomorrow arrives carrying receipts.

Every word.

Every choice.

Every silence.

Every moment you thought someone would always be there because they had always been there before.

That’s the gamble.

People mistake consistency for captivity.

They think because you stayed yesterday, you’ll stay tomorrow.

Because you forgave once, you’ll forgive twice.

Because you answered the phone, you’ll always answer.

Because you loved them through one version of themselves, you signed some invisible agreement to tolerate every version after.

You didn’t.

Head up.

Chin out.

Back straight.

Walk like you own the streets.

Because you own the streets.

Not literally.

The city would probably send a tax bill and require some ridiculous permit.

But walk like the pavement remembers your footsteps.

Walk like the buildings have watched you survive things nobody standing beside you knows about.

Walk like there are entire chapters beneath your coat.

Because there are.

Today was one of those days I should have stayed under the covers, computer in hand, communicating exclusively with people who know what they are saying and actually mean it.

No meetings.

No explanations.

No humans wandering around emotionally naked asking everyone else to put clothes on them.

Just darkness.

Coffee.

A laptop.

Maybe rain against the windows if the universe wanted to cooperate with the aesthetic.

Because sometimes you’re just tired of everyone vomiting their internal drama onto the world.

Everywhere.

At work.

Online.

At dinner.

In grocery store aisles.

In text messages long enough to qualify for publishing rights.

Everybody has a crisis.

Everybody has a villain.

Everybody has been wronged.

Everybody has a twenty-seven-part explanation for why they absolutely cannot change the one thing they complain about every fucking day.

And eventually you realize something uncomfortable.

Some people don’t want change.

They want validation.

They don’t want the door.

They want you to sit beside them on the floor and agree the room is impossible to escape.

They don’t want the truth.

They want witnesses.

They want someone to hold their hand while they repeatedly touch the stove and then agree that fire has personally betrayed them.

Again.

And again.

And again.

There is a point where empathy becomes participation.

A point where listening becomes feeding.

A point where comforting someone becomes helping them remain exactly where they are.

Nobody talks about that part.

We’re supposed to validate everything now.

Every feeling.

Every interpretation.

Every wound.

Every reaction.

As if feeling something automatically makes the story surrounding it true.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes your feelings are valid and your behavior is bullshit.

Sometimes you were hurt and still became the person doing the hurting.

Sometimes the trauma explains you but doesn’t excuse you.

Sometimes the person who left wasn’t cruel.

They were exhausted.

Sometimes nobody abandoned you.

They simply stopped volunteering to drown beside you.

And sometimes the most necessary sentence anyone can give you is the one nobody wants to hear.

You are not valid.

Not this time.

Not in this version.

Not in the story where everyone else is responsible for fixing what you refuse to touch.

Your pain may be real.

Your grief may be real.

Your anger may be real.

But the throne you built from it is still made of bones.

Eventually you have to get down.

The strange thing about the old house was that people kept returning to it.

Years passed.

Different cars appeared outside.

Different shoes climbed the steps.

Different hands knocked on the same door.

People who once walked away without looking back suddenly found themselves standing beneath its porch light again.

Needing something.

Advice.

Help.

Forgiveness.

Access.

A favor.

A familiar voice.

Maybe just proof they could still knock and someone would answer.

The woman always came to the door.

That’s the part everyone misunderstood.

She wasn’t cruel.

She wasn’t hiding.

She wasn’t sitting in the darkness plotting revenge.

She simply wasn’t the woman they remembered.

They would smile.

She would smile.

They would speak her name like a password.

And sometimes she would help them.

Sometimes she wouldn’t.

But they always noticed the same thing before leaving.

The doorway looked smaller than they remembered.

The hallway looked different.

The warmth was gone from certain rooms.

The furniture had moved.

Their photographs were missing.

Their old seat at the table belonged to someone else.

And that’s what people don’t understand about returning.

You can come back.

Nobody said you couldn’t.

But coming back doesn’t mean returning to the same place.

Time redecorates.

Pain renovates.

Absence changes the locks.

And the person you thought would always leave the porch light on eventually learns how beautiful the house looks in the dark.

Tonight the planets hang exactly where they once hung in 2017.

Same sky.

Same arrangement.

Same ancient bodies looking down at a completely different version of me.

Maybe that’s the point.

Maybe the universe doesn’t repeat itself to give us another chance to become who we were.

Maybe it repeats itself to see whether we still are.

So scream into the sky.

Drop whatever has been cutting into your palms.

Stop carrying 2017 into 2026 like the past is going to suddenly apologize for being exactly what it was.

Remember it.

Learn from it.

Then put the damn thing down.

Because somewhere tonight another person is looking at that same arrangement in the sky.

They remember the house.

They remember the woman.

They remember exactly where the key used to be hidden.

So they drive down the old street.

They climb the familiar steps.

They reach beneath the place where the spare key lived nine years ago.

Nothing.

They knock.

Once.

Twice.

Then harder.

No answer.

They look through the window.

And that’s when they realize the house isn’t empty.

The lights are on.

Someone is laughing inside.

Life continued.

The planets came all the way back around.

They did too.

But she didn’t.