The Fallen Star

One day, something fell from the ceiling of my bedroom. It wasn’t loud enough to startle me, just a soft tap against the old carpeted floor that had been in every one of my bedrooms. I looked down and saw a blue glow-in-the-dark star -- one of the dozens I had stuck to my ceiling two or three years ago. The sticky plaster had finally given up.

I picked it up, like it was asking me to, sitting in the middle of the newly vacuumed floor, ruining the symmetry. It felt so dusty and gross to even touch. So, I went to the trash to toss it, as it hadn’t been the first time these stars had fallen.

But before I tossed it, out of instinct, I looked up.

The rest of the stars were still there, scattered unevenly across the ceiling. Some I didn’t think would ever fall, while others seemed like they would fall any second. I remembered standing on top of my bed and randomly trying to place them in a pattern on my ceiling. I didn’t have the thought nor the effort to put them up as real constellations, although I had imagined them as much. I used to trace them with my eyes in the dark, trying to find a connection where they looked like the Big Dipper.

Thinking about these memories made me realize how old these stories were, and that’s when the feeling hit me: Everything felt familiar.

For the next few days, I started noticing things I previously hadn’t given any thought to. The tiny holes in the wall from screws that once held shelves. The unevenly patched carpets from picking at the carpet tufts too many times. The dust that collected in random places, which I often forgot to clean.

My desk was covered in scratches and grease stains from overuse. There were still ink marks I never bothered to clean, and a small burn mark where I left my coffee cappuccino candle on for too long. Even some of the white paint was starting to come up at the corners.

None of it was new; everything had been beaten up. That was the problem.

This feeling of familiarity didn’t feel comforting nor unsettling. It was just there. Like suddenly seeing a pattern you’d walked past a hundred times without thinking about it, or like finally finding the lost piece to a puzzle you could’ve lived without finishing. 

Living with constant change had always been the only thing I could rely on, but that shifted. My constant became my room, my house, my neighborhood. Change was now the irregular one.

That fallen blue glow-in-the-dark star did end up in the trash, but as more days passed, I kept thinking about it. It made me aware that I had changed. That sometimes things will eventually start to slowly but quietly loosen, until they become so apparent that you can no longer ignore them.

That night, when I turned off the lights, the remaining stars still glowed brightly, somehow never losing their spark. I stared at them for a while, quietly observing, and wondered when another would fall. Whether that would be tomorrow or in another 2–3 years, mildly accepting that this familiarity was my new normal and that would be okay.