Star light is bent light

June 16, 1980

Let’s say, she’s young.

That’s why she doesn’t understand – headstrong and caught up in the idea of love, dreams and a happy life.

She does not know the compromises people make when growing older – the job one settled for when the checks start coming in;  the man, one marries when the years go on without other, better offers; the children she puts up with because of loneliness and the  doleful husband’s arrival at home as lord of the manor.

So we spoil our children; then regret it.

So we lean on them; but make them think they lean on us.

She doesn’t know it yet. She can’t see the disappointments as they flicker by in her life, as dreams vaporize and we are left with wet hands from the bursting bubbles, dreams that die hard; but are also hard to catch.

She doesn’t know.

You try to warn her, to tell her about the bumps and bruises, the wounds and lacerations that will come into her life.

But they don’t listen at her age; they just turn and say, “Oh mother, stop being so dramatic!”

And they leave to find their dreams.

And she doesn’t hear the words her man is really saying, when “I love you,” really means, “I want you,” and “I care,” means for now, not forever.

She just laughs and walks into that world.

“Nothing is forever,” the world warns her, a world that hurls angry words at dreamers, insisting that they “grow up” or “face facts,” or “deal with reality,” when nobody really knows what reality is.

She doesn’t know that starlight is bent light, and that the world doesn’t fundamentally change and the dreams don’t come true.

And yet, sometimes they do, and she insists that she is different, and that star light is still star light, bent or not, and that the world does change every day, only some people just refuse to see it, and she walks towards tomorrow determined, with her dreams clutched firmly in her hand, willing to defy what others dare call reality,