After the Season You Chose

You left, and for a while
my sky forgot how to arrange its stars—
not shattered, not ending,
just unlearning your orbit.

There was a night that lingered too long,
where even constellations felt like memory,
and I, small beneath them,
mistook darkness for permanence.

But even night obeys a deeper law—
Eos still rises, no matter how long
Nyx holds the horizon in her palms.

And I began to move.

Not in pursuit of you,
but in reverence for the body I forgot I lived in.

I ran—
not as punishment, but as worship.
Like Hermes across wind-carved roads,
feet kissing the earth like messages meant for no one but myself,
learning that motion is a kind of truth the gods respect.

I ate—
not for absence, not for filling space you left behind,
but as Demeter intended,
receiving grain and fruit like sacred return,
honoring the body as a season that must be fed to bloom.

I slept—
as Selene watches over the quiet world,
letting Hypnos pull the ache from my bones,
thread by thread,
until even my dreams remembered how to be kind.

And slowly—
the heavens within me reorganized.

Not around your departure,
but around my becoming.

My body, once a quiet eclipse,
learned again how to hold light without breaking.

I found new constellations in myself—
habits that did not ask to be loved by anyone else to exist,
hobbies that spark like distant galaxies forming in real time,
a care that is no longer conditional on being seen.

And I understand now:
you chose your season the way the sky must—
honestly, irrevocably, like a planet leaving a familiar sun.

I do not resent the gravity of that choice.

But I have learned my own celestial law:

I am not a sky that collapses
when one star decides to leave.

I am a system still expanding.

And somewhere in that expansion,
I stopped waiting for your light
to tell me I was whole.

So go on—
be the comet that needed a different sky.

I will not chase you across my universe anymore.

I am learning instead
how to orbit myself.

And if ever our paths cross in the great turning of things—
two bodies briefly aligned under indifferent stars—
you may find me no longer in darkness,

but in motion,

becoming.