Celestial Beauty

What is beauty?

Is it the quality in a person or thing that pleasurably exalts the mind and spirit? Or perhaps it is a combination of qualities such as form, proportion, and even colour that simply delights the sight?

Beauty, not unlike perfection, does not exist. At least, not by itself. It only exists in the eye of the beholder.

Real beauty is not only in yourself, but in the things around you.

Things like stars.

Often described as astronomical objects consisting of a luminous spheroid held together by their own gravity, stars are just glowing balls of gas, mostly hydrogen and helium.

In simpler words, they are naught but natural shining bodies visible in the sky, especially at night. 

The earlier definition, that was what an astrophysicist was supposed to know.

But she didn’t think that.

“Why limit yourself to one perspective?” Astrid would often wonder, as she gazed up at the endless arch of the void black night sky.

The world had so much to offer. Why look at it in one fixed way, when there were an infinite number of ways present?

As a scientist, she knew a lot of things about the vaults of heavens. And she sure as hell knew a whole lot about their glimmering guardians.

Stars could die. Supernova, it was called.

“How ironic.” She would think.

“That something as pretty as that word could mean something so sad.”

But although they could die, just like any other human on this planet, stars could also live up to billions of years. A trait humans certainly didn’t possess.

That meant that the stars Astrid was admiring right now, they had probably been seen by millions of people before her.

She didn’t mind that. In fact, she didn’t think it was possible to ever get tired of watching them. She knew they would always look the same, but somehow, that was the beautiful thing about them. That in an ever changing, always moving world, they were the one thing that remained constant.

They were timeless.

The stars winked at her. As they glittered in all their finery, Astrid couldn’t help but notice the different colours. Some were birthstone blue or sequin silver. Others were molten gold and polar white. One in particular looked solar yellow to her.

But each colour was as wonderful as the last.

Yet one thing in common was the faint silver tint all of them seemed to have. The ones that were situated the farthest away, almost beyond human comprehension, they looked like pinpricks amid a shroud of darkness.

It appeared to Astrid, that there was a sort of snowfall in space, and that she was honoured to witness it.

Collectively, they looked like stardust had been scattered across the entire sky, as if a hand large enough had been capable of tossing diamond dust.

As though they were lights of hope for all the world’s lost souls.

But today, Astrid decided, she didn’t look at them in that way.

Today, she didn’t want to look at them in any particular way.

For at the end of the day, they were just stars, and she was just a girl.

Just for today, she was just a girl who loved the everlasting stars.