There are approximately 200-400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Currently 6,898,100,000 humans occupy planet Earth. The average size of a meteoroid that causes a shooting star to fall is a centimeter in diameter; correspondingly, it only takes one person for a miracle to happen. The stars are dim tonight. Lights of Tampa smudge their evanescent light. It’s sad though…but our hands are identical. Same hands. “Palm to palm is holy palmer’s kiss” or at least that’s what I was forced to read in 9th grade. It’s a pathetic topic, love—or maybe I am just too naive. There’s an imprint there, an undesirable indentation that I would like to cover up like ski tracks in the snow with impending, burying sleet; yielding for another to make fresh marks in.

You look at the stars and your world feels tiny; a little bubble in the sea, a phytoplankton suspended in saltwater, a speck in the universe unable to be seen with the naked eye though it’s mechanism indispensable. A role so fundamental on the marine food-chain the world would be in shambles without. Look at the sky and think of such insignificantly sized organisms, but still so vital. Look in the mirror and see nothing at all. You often argue this when given the chance.The universe is quiet at the moment, and small. It can be measured with splayed out salt crystals scattered across a black lab counter in chemistry class. With a switch of a Bunsen burner, pennies turned to gold and fire glowed emerald—I played God, with these interactions with compounds and catalysts and molecules colliding that mesmerized me. So. With the white salt grains, a single galaxy stretched from the edge of the once sterile lab counter,

metaphorical spheres of light with the momentary disappearance of the sun. It just so happened that a neighboring lab partner just had to scratch his scalp and out tumbled flakes of dandruff extending this picture in front of me. I complimented this development to him, though he was not amused as he glared at me through goggled eyes.

I take a breath. This feeling is different. It is yearning, not necessity, gracious in desire. Simultaneously weighty lead and intangible like invisible rice paper, wrapped in candies that melt on your tongue. Elusive like smoke gliding through fingertips like racing salmon, slipping evenly past clasped hands. Disappearing as quickly as embers rising out of a fireplace, perpetually fleeting. Maybe because fear is not meant to be permanent. And for me to believe that, would be a small, quiet, monumental miracle.