Waiting for a Star to Fall

I laid on my back staring at the sky. Looking for the “spectacular” meteor shower for which I’ve waited all week. It was so dark in my back yard. And if it not for a group of kids playing a very excited game of hide and go seek at the ballpark behind my house, it would have also been very quiet. I only saw one. One meteor. Maybe two. But the second one I couldn’t be sure of. Before my eyes could refocus their attention towards it, it faded. Or maybe it wasn’t ever there in the first place. Maybe my eyes are playing tricks on my mind. I don’t know. I can’t be sure.
As I laid there thinking about the meteor that was or wasn’t there, my thoughts drifted to people.

I thought of how some people in your life are like the second meteor that was or wasn’t there. And of how you can never be sure of them. The more you look for them, the more they fade away. And then I’ll remember something they said to me or something they shared with me or something I felt because of them and for a moment, there they are. But are they? Were they ever there? I can’t be sure. And the memory fades.

And it is sad. How unsure I am of them. How I can’t be sure of anything about them. How I can’t rely on my own memories of them because their words became untrue and disappeared from the pages when I needed them. Just like how I believed that there were lots of meteor showers somewhere in the darkness that I was staring into…logically, I knew they were there but something prevented me from seeing them…light pollution, clouds, the angle I was watching... the moth that kept attacking me! I knew they were there behind the black blanket of sky…but how could I be sure? I couldn’t. So I just watched…and waited.