As a child I can remember at night I would sometimes go out, if the weather was decent, to the backyard and sit in a swing on our swingset and mindlessly drift to and fro while looking up to the sky and the stars above.
Yeah, I was kind of freaky kid at times, hell I'm kind of a freak now for that matter, but I would stare up and pick out the constellations and planets I knew, think about things a while, then back to the stars and so on. I am now sure I was on to something there.
As I got older, I certainly wasn't going to be in a swing like a damned moron, so I forgot the stars and the attendant pondering staring at them brought me and I focused on things much nearer the ground. These things seemed important at the time, but most of these supposed life or death moments and what they were escape me just now.
As an adult I moved away. I lived very near a large city and one couldn't see the first star due to the ambient lighting around the city. The moon was about it. Even had I been able to see them, I am sure my focus was still with the ground and it's allure and so I surely would have ignored the stars all the same.
My life had moved in what turned out to be pointless directions, every path was a dead end. Instinctively somehow, I started burning bridges one after another and began moving towards some new unknown destination. I knew not what, I just knew something called me away.
My new direction took me away from most of what I previously had known. Eventually, I found myself sitting on a porch one night with a drink in my hand. There was a calm all around me that at first I found strange. As I sat gently rocking, drinking my drink, I looked up and realized I could again see a sky full of twinkling lights. I took in their magestic glow and my mind, remembering old habits, leisurely wandered here and there.
Finally, the puzzle of life started to made sense again. And the stars it seems, had really been there the whole time waiting, I just had to get back to a place I where I could see them again.
I will never forget those far away beacons ever again and while I don't have a swing just now, I still make time every night and sometimes early in the wee hours of the morning, to return to my old friends. Finally fate lands me gloriously full circle.
It's nice to among old friends.