Originally posted September 16, 2022
They say that light hangs timeless in an eternal now.
They say that each glimmer of starlight is a glimpse of grace; that heaven lurks among those twinkling pinpricks and only light will ever be truly saved, in that eternity lingering between emission and absorption.
They lie.
It's obvious if you have the nose to smell it. Few do, and fewer bother.
Sunlight is clean and fresh, as warm and welcoming as a corpse whose blood has not yet remembered to cool. Moonlight is dripping blood and petrichor, familiar as any reflection's smile.
But starlight ...
You can't smell it most of the time. It's so faint, so tenuous: drowned in sunlight and moonlight and citylight, diffused by pollution and eagerly slurped up by those vast fungal shapes thronging hungrily through the atmosphere. Everything has to be perfect.
Go out into the woods on a clear night, a night when the moon hides her face in shame and the sun has fallen deeper than any broken halo. Find a time when the sky is unbroken and empty, when the stars cannot help but dance before your eyes.
Open your mind.
Inhale.
Don't vomit.
Heaven is full of rot.
There's no such thing as a timeless now, no eternal grace—light is dead and rotting, and in those vast gulfs between There and Here it passes far beyond any sense of mundane decay: endless ecosystems of filth rise and fall in the fetid star-filled void.
Starlight drips and reeks and rots, a smell that permeates all that it touches, endless hunger's grasping fingers thoughtlessly smearing their corruption across unwary matter—it hurts, oh how it hurts, it grasps my nose and clenches my stomach and tears my throat to ribbons—
There is nothing waiting up there, nothing, just corpses that don't know they're dead and heaven's putrid effluvia, nothing but hunger sinking in and running through the veins and remaking everything it touches—
Pray for cloudy nights, unwary traveler; pray that fungus saves us.