I can’t bear to look upwards tonight.

If I cannot see it, it cannot exist. My view, narrowed as a telescope, doesn’t point to the stars, rather, it fixates besides my feet. And there it will stay, cast in my own shadow, blocked from the moonlight on my back.

If I happen to expand my telescope and let it veer off course, I’ll still be presented with the same taunting, heavy, blinding omen that follows me like a shadow.

A reminder. A numbing reminder of my fanciful wants and needs that can never be fulfilled. The spotlight glares down on me and my empty belly. My faulty, leaking valves and my inhospitable insides. My unwomanhood.

I remember the first jeer of the moon, poised outside my hospital window in full force. A blood moon. It shone against the back of my late fiance, illuminating the tear-tracks on his cheeks and outlining his silhouette like a gaudy neon sign. His crocodile tears didn’t move me. Didn’t beckon me over to comfort him. After all, his concerns lay way beyond my own loss, so why should I let my sorrows fall on him?

He was consumed by _his _future, his legacy. He was mourning the choice he made to marry me, rather than looking at the blood that soaked the crotch of my hospital gown. And that was when he thought to himself — a loving, childless marriage could never replace his desire for a son. An heir.

It was safe to say that he left my bedside and my rotting womb before the sun came up.

The moon, once a mystical comfort, now sour and cold. When the moon becomes full and bountiful and fertile, I am empty and useless and red.

The stars fare no better. They’re the moon’s kin — miniature versions of the celestial body that kisses the perimeter of the sky.

If I stare into the night for too long, I’ll want my very own star. My own constellation. Rather than blood coating my insides, I’ll want stardust to excude — a sign of life. Of hope.

That’s the reason I don’t look upwards anymore. When presented with the possibility of everything, all my nothings are too great to bare.

So, for now, I will be content with my own empty night sky.