Celestial

Saturn

The day that Saturn rose instead of the moon, most people panicked.

That's a bit of an exaggeration. The moon was not replaced, simply joined. Saturn resided right beside it, great and glowing, and filling the night sky with its vast expanse. It blinded the stars. However, the fact that people panicked is not exaggerated.

Half of the population believed that the end of the Earth was coming. The others scrambled to join as many religions as they could.

Me?

I was not panicked. When you wake up every day believing you'll die, things like this don't seem to scare you much. For me, the slowly approaching planet was another obstacle to face. Another sadness. Another weight on my own shoulders.

So I continued my life, watching people run in circles around me. Trying to escape their doom... But the problem is, there is no way to escape an entire planet. "How can you be so calm?!" they shouted around me. "The world is ending!"

"My world is always ending," I usually replied.

And I almost began to feel love for the planet. The planet that approached us night after night. I thought maybe the disasterous, rising, ocean levels were a thing of beauty. The melting ice, and the shifting of the planet, as the gravity tugged at it, was like a transformation.

Saturn glowed purple, grey, white, and rusty. The rings continued to circle around it as usual, and if I squinted, I could begin to make out asteroids flying past the Earth. The planet seemed so large, and gentle, and beautiful. It was hard to imagine it plowing into this world, destroying ages of technology, memory, and human life.

It was enough to make you sad. I found myself turning away from humans during this time. It was too painful to know that those frightened eyes you looked into would soon be specks of star, floating through the universe. But I thought it was kind of beautiful too.

People didn't seem to notice me when I was falling victim to the dark parts of my thoughts. After all, depression is a danger we have grown to ignore. But now that we were faced with tangible fate... they thought I was different.

Courageous, I suppose.

On this particular night, I was on the roof, facing my murderer.

Most of the time, from my spot on the roof, I could hear the thumping music from the parties of teens. I suppose they were desperate to get some sort of satisfaction from their numbered days. Tonight, though, I heard nothing besides the soft cooing of sleepy birds in the trees, and sad, soft music drifting from our old neighbor's house.

The music would usually annoy me: the sappy kind of love songs that elderly people like to listen too... but tonight, it seemed strangely appropriate.

Ironic, even.

We were being chased by a great destroyer, who would not think for a moment about crushing our planet into dust. Yet, we still had the hope to listen to love songs.

I laid back. The air was crisp and cold around me, and I could feel the wind rippling through my sweater. But my eyes were glued to the planet, taking up the entire sky. I stared up at it: as small as an ant, outstretched on my roof. Most of the stars were extinguished by the impending light. I raised a shaky hands to the sky, and began to count the remaining specks of light. A few days ago, it would have impossible to number the fire in the sky. But now... I could count exactly four stars.

I counted them. And counted them again. Over and over, as if the fact that there were still four stars in the sky would put a halt to the planet.

The air was stiff with anticipation as far away, the deadly planet continued to attack.

This was it. I felt death close to me. Living each day as if you were dying, ridden with anxiety, I had learned to find beauty in the sadness.

And I could not deny that Saturn was beautiful.