Wait, Am I the Moon?

I remember nights under starlit skies, peering through the perfect-shade-of-red telescope my mom had gotten me for Valentine’s day. Those craters I’d stare at hold a different sort of wonder for me now. I suppose I’d never pieced together the terror in the beauty of it all. Pelted by time and space, displayed to some teenage jerk with notions that being small holds its own sort of peace. Thrust into the spotlight, chased through the months and years and decades and millennia–and somehow still never truly seen. An offshoot. A satellite. In orbit, and ever so predictable. Defined by relationship. Studied subject of conspiracy and of religion and of anything under the sun, but on its own, nothing so terribly interesting. We landed on the moon, left our junk, and pretty much Charlie Browned about it–I got a rock, style. There it is, just hanging mid-air, doing whatever it is a moon does to get by, and nothing more.