It is 11 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 27. Tonight, I went for a walk around the suburbs that flank this little campus. It was cold and dark, and despite the light of the streetlamps emanating out into the open air, when I looked up, the stars were shining.

I took the hand of the person next to me and pointed up to the sky and said, “Look, the stars are so pretty tonight!”

But then I turned to face them and there was no one there, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe.

Before I was alive, my mom had a dream that she was standing in a field of four leaf clovers, and there were two moons in the sky. She knew then and there that she was pregnant with twins. My brother was born first, and I came soon after him, but between us, midnight split our births into two separate days. This was my first love. It was fraternal and filled with days of gold and sunlight, and in it, I learned to coexist.

When cancer came, it brought with it my first moments of solitude, as well as the sudden realization that I Am Going To Die, It Will Be Very Soon, and I Will Take Nothing With Me In The End. 

This caused two different things to happen. First, I erected walls. A lot of them. I interact directly with few people, and fewer still have managed to penetrate into my inner sanctum. I cannot anticipate who these people are and have attempted to collect them over time, but I often find that they slip through my fingers easily and only a handful of them still remain close to me.

Second, my brain aged rapidly. And by that, I don’t mean that I learned how to act older than my age; I mean that all things became Nostalgia. The song I heard on the radio yesterday can’t be played again for fear of drumming up the most concentrated emotional moments of my life. A fleeting crush on a girl is a final goodbye before the tunnel closes, and every sunset is a fitting backdrop for the man wrongly sentenced to death.

I did not learn how to embrace solitude. Instead, I found my second love. This one was romantic, and as I left my teenage years behind, I found it poisonous. From it I was taught that manhood is not built in the moments viewed by outsiders, but instead by what only the man sees in himself under the cover of darkness.

As the wreckage of my second love smoldered, my third love came. This one was passionate; a vintage sports car displaced from its proper era. This love taught me patience; I mended it as it mended me, and together we learned that love is not built solely on passion, but instead is a violent act of rebellion, one that must strike in an unending series or it withers and dies.

This love has stuck around, but it is mechanical. It cannot keep solitude at bay, and I have spent my last few years learning just to exist. And to collect, even that which cannot pierce into my sanctum. I love my car. I love my mom, and I love my dad. I love my sister, and I love my dog, and I love my friends.

Why do I tell you these things? What does it matter to you?

I have watched you for some time now. I have seen your haste to find the two moons in the sky and desperately try to pick every clover in the field. And while I have not yet learned to live in solitude, I have discovered that, while I Am Going To Die and I Will Take Nothing With Me In The End, there is still time to fill between now and Very Soon. 

So please, don’t be scared. Tomorrow I will breathe again. Tomorrow the stars will fade and the sun will return, and when it does, you and I will both see those two moons in the sky and that field of clovers for all that they are.

 Just a dream.