The Starsinger, the Starsinger, the Starsinger, he sings.

His histories have long been recorded—in every pit stop he has visited. In every station he has stayed. It may be just a minute of the traffickers slapping the Bini out of his mouth, or them telling him to recite the Western verse, or them colonizing his heart. But he remembers. Oh, the Starsinger remembers. Every moment, drawn out long, like it was the end of the world. Every colonization, all the trafficking done. The pain of it all, scorching like a planet too close the sun, it is burned into memory, and he will never forget.

The scars are seared into his forehead. The world is dark and vast. Space is the unforgiving dusk, stretched out like time, cold and bleak. Full of so much possibility. And so much hurt.

But still—he sings.

He’s on the moon of Seres now, but it could be anywhere. Any place that he has ever been: whether in iron shackles or of his own free will, whether as a bound servant or as a joyful man. He doesn’t care. He lets it out.

He sings—all battles be subsided, all trafficked be freed. All slave ships be fallen. All world chains be broken. Every covenant to hold the dark, break it. He’s praying long and deep and hard: Set it free, set it free, set the whole world free, every darkness that still lays, bind it.

But Starsinger still wants more from the stars—a wish, but he cannot say it. He cannot sing it nor can he pray it. He keeps on stretching out clasped hands, praying to God beyond the stars, that these his ancestors who live in constellations, that these his loved ones he sings to, that the stars of his ancients: Oh set them free, oh set them free, oh release their spirits and memories to him.

The traffickers colonized him, and his ancestors fled his mind. He can barely remember their tongues traced on his teeth. Where they have traced their signs, where they have cried, he does not know. But the stars are all he knows. The stars are all that is left. They took half his memory and half his life.

That is the greatest hurt of all.

• • • •

The Mechfighter, the Mechfighter, the Mechfighter, she fights.

I’m ready for this world.

From my mother, I learnt the little dances. The shoulder shimmy. The sidestep. The ugho. From my father, I learnt my action moves—uppercut, lower cut, centre fist. From my teachers, I got the wisdom of engineering, the world accessed to me: Space is not my limitation, I am looking forward and within.

The academy is meant to break the weak mechfighters, but that is not me. On orientation day, when they are doing the drills to train us soldiers, I keep moving. When they wake us up at dawn and tell us to run laps around the white fence quarters, I am the first to go. When my roommates leave our sardine-sized dorms to socialize at nearby robot bars, I practice in my suit: every technique, every dance; machinery is my fluid state, my second being.

I practice even when I’m sleeping. My academy roommates, Peter and Angela, they say they see me sleepwalking, sleep dancing, up at night when no one is looking. Near the large white academy fences, looking up above at the blue-black sky, moving and flowing in my routine. Angela sneers and says my movements are the opposite of what I need to be for the Mech academy: rigid, strong, and I ignore her. She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know me.

I’m sure there are many reasons why I sleepwalk. I’ve always been a restless girl, who hops from left to right, a dancer. I’ve never been too good at sleeping—I’m always punching the air, kicking my nightmares, starting an attack. But these days I think I sleepwalk for a new reason—and it is my dreams. I stand in the vast distance of black, just waiting, fluid, body full of longing. There is a voice far beyond me, an echo of a different world, a promise that almost calls to me but is not yet fulfilled. In the darkness, there is a song.

I expect to forget it, each time it happens, but I remember. I can taste it all, I can feel it all, even when I wake up. The tabs I write the dreams on make it sound unreal.

Though I can’t help but feel that there’s something more.

• • • •

Starsinger sings three more times on the moon of Seres, night after night, but even that is not enough. There’s still a hollow part inside his chest, one that grows each time he sings and he remembers nothing. How he wishes they were here, his grand-elders’ tongues, their layers of proverbs and stories that always guided him. How he wishes he remembered them, even; their faces when they appeared to him in prayer, full of light. Full of love.

These days, Starsinger’s been looking for anything to fill the void in his life, the hurt. He went on a spree around the low-level asteroid towns of the stratosphere, begging the laborers of the world to put him to some quick menial labor. He tried to put his energy into muscle and heavy lifting, but it didn’t work. He kept running off every time he saw a child move through the street that he thought was being trafficked.

Starsinger knows he can’t work traditionally. Not in the way that the world needs of him: to push rocks and break gravel—the afterlife for most trafficking survivors. But still, he prays, for hope.

He knows that hope will not find him easily, that he has to search for it. So he sings, he prays, he goes to his church on most days and gives offerings. He joins missionary work when he can’t think of anything else; he dedicates his time further into church worship. He uses the church as a safe haven for his distress, as it is a place where no one judges him or questions him. He can just be. He can just give himself time to believe.

But belief is hard when there is nothing to work with.

• • • •

I expected this world to be tough, but I think I underestimated it. To start, all the things that I have learned in the past—I’m told they’re useless. My roommates laugh at me when I tell them all the things I were once taught. The shoulder shimmy, Angela mocks me, as she jumps into a mech kneel that shakes the foundation of our clustered room. Peter claps for her. It is a perfect stance. The posters of ballet dancers on my side of the room all fall to the floor.

The lessons of my mother and father are described as child’s play, a disgrace. I try to tell them it’s linked to my culture; that some of the dances, like the ugho, are the little my parents taught me about my Bini ancestry, but Angela scoffs and thinks it shows me lacking knowledge. Peter stays silent when she says no excuses. They both don’t think I’m smart enough.

At our training sessions, the new academy teacher thinks differently—she doesn’t doubt what I’ve learned. She doubts me. No, she says, when I do my own mech kneel, with a graceful swish of my leg; she thinks it is too fluid, not enough force. Wrong, she screams, when I try to use my upper-arm buttons to make my mech form a counterattack. She says I’m supposed to be intimidating, and yet my mech moves too loosely. She doesn’t think I have it in me—the fight, the spirit, the mind to face the ugliness of this world.

But I like grace. This is why I’m here: I want to be a soldier in protecting the land. I want to defend the stratosphere from unexpected asteroid attacks that often come our way. I want to be two things: dancer and fighter combined, fluid. But she doesn’t care. Like others in my life, she thinks I need to pick one. Be graceful or be tough. Be one or the other. No space for more.

It grates against my ribs. My mech, my truth—she wants to fill it with lies that will suit her. I want to fight her, everything designed to break me—but it feels too real. What I’m being told—it feels like a truth I must accept to grow. It feels like all the things I need to do to not be cut.

And then I don’t know what to believe. In my dreams, there’s a crack in the world and I can hear a voice roaring so many distances apart, a siren song breaking the universe five times deep, a bellow that lets out. When I ask for a message, when I try to call out to the dark, all that fills my throat are more stars, and then I am not sure what is true, or what is more lies.

• • • •

Starsinger doesn’t want to be cynical, so he tries not to doubt. He tries not to overthink or overestimate or over-replay the memories, to live out his trauma. He sings three times in church the next week, he goes to confession, letting out the hurt. One day, the minister tells him there is more that he can do, more ways he can worship, and he jumps at the opportunity. The man hands him a flyer for a conference trip the church is planning to take to a smaller asteroid city.

But Starsinger knows the place by the first letter—it is Cem-5, one of the less-respected regions of his world, a small asteroid city where African migrants often end up when they leave the dying Earth. It’s also the major trafficking city, the place where long ago, as a child, his abusers lured him from Earth with the promise of a better life. So Starsinger’s voice catches in his chest, and his hand trembles when he reads the paper, and he asks the minister if he can have more time.

That night, he takes the last ferry to the moon of Seres once again, under the cover of dusk when no one can see him. It is the hour when tourists are leaving after sightseeing a world they will never inhabit, when children are begging their parents for a second viewing of the mystical moon. Seres is the place where most of his trafficked friends have gone to die, a moon so bright and blue they claim it burns up the pain, but each time he goes, it’s to preserve their memories.

So he sings: so loud that the matte sand of the moon trembles against his feet, that the craters on its sides roar and croon with him. He prays: deep and hard for a change to come that will bring his world to a reckoning. For a world that will home him instead of chain him, for a love that will house him instead of mistreat him, for a revolution that will take off the evils of this life and bring down the mask.

He can see the terrors of the world as he sings—the government continuing to kill migrants, the soldiers who often act as brutalists and accomplices, the traffickers who get away with slavery, the clear injustices. They come against his vision like the power of a new sun and cloud his memory, but still he roars till everything that’s bound to break him shatters against his feet.

And then in the light of the moon’s sand: He sees it. The image of a church in Cem-5, a bright light shining through the gray and oblong planet, rolling across his vision like a glory of a resurrection. The land promises him a blessing. All he’s been looking for. All he’s needed.

The next day, he registers his name for the journey. There is a lightness in his chest, one that grows and expands with the force of a mass.

• • • •

I keep sleepwalking in the dark. Waking up at odd times covered in sweat and being in bed most of the time. I don’t even need anyone to tell me that they saw me up at night, because by the time I wake up, I know what has happened. There’s a feeling afterwards, something I can’t shake, like a sin I’ve tried to pray away but won’t be forgiven.

I’m starting to lose my confidence. Everything I say ends with a question mark. Validation is hard to find. At the academy this week, I tried to show the teacher my new mech stance, but all she was concerned about was how fast I could shoot, reload my mech guns. I tried to tell her about my goals once again, my purpose, but she just told me that my job was to dispose of invaders living on unrecognized asteroids. But I had never seen any invaders. Only migrants. I couldn’t stop the lump from forming in my throat, the stars of my dreams grating against my ribs and heart with a rigid attack.

All I can do is think: Why am I full of doubts, why am I sleepwalking every day now, who is this singer, why is my mech joining to my skin while I sleep, why are there stars in my throat.

What lies in the dark? Is anything real?

• • • •

Starsinger follows the missionaries into the heart of Cem-5 the following week, moving at their lead. The mission is supposed to be done in less than five hours, fast enough so that they can go to the major cities, but this land is all that is major to him. All through the ship ride, he prays, he sings, holding on to the railings of his seat to calm him. O, he sings, let this be the start of something new. He cannot go back to his old life. His abuse.

Starsinger knows he’s in Cem-5 before he even enters the city: He can smell its dust and palm-nut heavy atmosphere before anything else. He can see the dark-skin children running around, petty traders arguing over sports bets, people dancing to music that is bass heavy, full of lifting. Cem-5 is a dented gray rock that stretches out to form hands that can warm its shoddy locale, and it’s so warm that even though Starsinger wants to hate it, even though it reminds him of his past, he knows it’s home for so many. But how nice it must be to have a home without the memories to hurt.

The church leaders instruct him to hand out holo-drives to locales, to evangelise, but Starsinger is distracted. He shares a few papers, smiling at them with wide eyes, before he drops the missionary fliers and goes off in search of his blessing, the promise of this land.

He sneaks off and goes to his first location on the map: a direct route that takes him through the Cem-5 markets and straight to the central church of Cem-5, a robotized stained-glass building whose shining pieces glimmer in the dull light of the planet’s evening sun. The building calls to him the moment he enters it, and it feels like he’s experiencing rebirth when he comes face-to-face with its bright yellow walls. Everywhere he walks, he can hear a hymn, and every seat in the tiled hall feels like a call to home. Being here gives him an inner peace he’s never felt, and he savors it; thinks of it as the start to something new. He gets on his knees and closes his eyes tight.

Bring them back, Starsinger begins to sing, and he tries to make the words feel bigger than the moon or space or any song that he’s sung before. He rises higher in his pitch, breaking the surface of his voice with his pleading. He cries and shakes, waiting for the world to crack open and reveal its blessing. O bring them back to me, bring them back to me, bring back to me. Please.

The room is silent with his pleas. The world still feels heavy and unforgiving. Nothing happens. Nothing changes. There’s no blessing here for him. No miracle. And Starsinger doesn’t get it.

Because if this journey didn’t deliver hope to him, then what will? Because if he can travel the world and still come to nothing, then what is the point of continuing to fight? Because if he returns to his home, then what is left for him if he doesn’t have a blessing? It all stops making sense. So, he rises up. He no longer believes.

And he stops singing.

• • • •

Things keep getting worse at the academy. I keep sleepwalking and wake late again one day and there’s no excuse. When I arrive at the academy training post, my rigid teacher tells me that I am as good as nothing, and the feeling weighs on my chest. I know she wants me to be removed from this world, wants me cut from the list of soldiers ever since I’ve refused to show her a single thing when I desperately want to be more than just one.

I’m getting too confused, and lost, and worried, and I need answers so badly for the things that trouble me. I sleep sometimes and all I feel is burning run over me; an ache whenever I wear my mech suit. I no longer feel confident like I did before—the world of a soldier now feels so uncertain, so worrying. I need to look for answers to deliver me from my anxiety, to give me a moment of clarity. So I ask Peter to watch me while I sleepwalk because I need to know. What are my dreams trying to tell me?

And Peter agrees. He sets himself by my bed while Angela laughs at me before she goes out with her friends to the nearby bars. Ignore her, Peter tries to tell me, but it’s hard to listen to him when he’s never stuck up for me. What if my dancing is too fluid, and that will be the thing that ultimately ruins me? What if my refusal to be categorized is preventing me from my glory? Why do I even want to be in an institution that is committed to rigidity; that is focusing on destruction?

And then I fall into a deep sleep soon after, and hours later Peter wakes me up.

“Well?” I ask him, desperately nervous when I sit next to his feet. What did I do in the dark, what are in the inner corners of my psyche? Where do I go when I sleepwalk—do I travel? Am I looking for something?

And Peter tells me, after watching me sleepwalk, that I don’t go anywhere. It shakes something within me, a deep layer of surprise.

Peter tells me that each night when I sleepwalk, I don’t go anywhere, that there’s no destination that I seek. He says that when I walk across the academy, I just dance in no particular direction and end up staying near the abandoned academy halls, like I’ve been waiting there my whole life. That I just swing my arms and move my hips back and forth, into the dreariness of space, of above, of the universe, like the whole world is right in front of me. And I stand there, amongst the stars, as if I’m a ghost that’s expecting to find an old friend but each night I’m disappointed. But I still wait for something to happen. And I stand there, fluid, and full of longing.

And when Peter says that, something breaks within me. In my spirit, in my heart. And then I know, without a doubt. I’m shaken away from questioning. I know my dreams are real.

• • • •

Starsinger hides in his room after the missionary journey—he’s fallen into dark. Even prayer is hard, the simple movement is painful, even faith is difficult. He can’t stop picturing the obliviousness of the world, the injustice, that the chains that have bound him will continue to go on without a bat eyelash in sight. Most of all, he’s rotting and growing hopeless. He can’t face anything outside his circle.

When he does go out, it is to try and get the government to investigate his trafficking case. He has to try and at least look for some kind of freedom, try to find healing in some action or word. Every night, he sees his traffickers, the memory of the past, and it infuriates him that the government has never dealt with that. But even then, when he goes up to the government institutions, when he asks nicely, once again to be taken seriously and open, they deny the chains the traffickers put on him and say he shackled himself.

“We do not have any information about your trafficking case.”

“I’ve given you reports, the names of the people who carried me from Earth, the trafficker’s names, and you never investigated my abusers,” he demands. He spits, he shouts, he’s weakened, he’s half dead.

“We do not have any records of your trafficking files. Are you sure you even reported it?” They say again. Every person he talks to, all artificial intelligence units, all of them he asks, none of them knows.

“Trafficking has been greatly reduced. There are hardly any known cases. The problem has been fixed.”

Starsinger wants to scream, wants to cry, wants to shout out in rage. All the children lost in the street, all the open spaces, his whole existence: a testimony to the hell he’s been put through. Why doesn’t anybody want to say what is already there? Why doesn’t anybody want to validate him? For a brief minute he thinks, maybe, just maybe, he might be dreaming, but—no. The world lies. The world lies and lies and lies into his face and tells him that they’ve never heard of what he’s seen.

He’s looking for strength, but the wishes aren’t coming through. He keeps his hands in his pockets and not ever clasped. He looks down to the floor and all he sees is the dark. Even when he thinks the stars are looking at him, he’s, for the first time, not sure.

If he’s like this now, if his wish hasn’t been granted, if he’s on the verge of thinking that there’s never going to be a deliverance in this miserable world—

Then there’s nothing left but the cold. And the dark. And the pain, stretching through his limbs, as he slowly grows frail, and pale, and helpless.

Void, swallow him.

• • • •

All I do is dream. The academy goes on, but it’s like I’m not there. I think the academy has gotten me to break. No. I am broken. They have started to make cuts at the academy, and I am the first to go. I see my name on the list of dismissed students, and something breaks right within me. I fall onto the edge of the floor of the academy halls, and nobody can comfort me. Peter tries to tell me it will be okay, that I can try to appeal the decision, but it is not, it can never be. I don’t even want to appeal. I am nothing anymore. I am just against the dark. I don’t know what to do. I am collapsed and gone.

• • • •

Starsinger stands on the edge of moon, looking at what’s below. His legs can’t stop shaking, and his tears, so full of salt, float into space. Void, swallow him. Darkness, eat him. World, destroy him. He’s been praying for a world to be free and all he feels is more and more weight pushing down his chest, the pain and anger of seeing a universe so addicted to its lies and denial that it’s unwilling to change.

He’s going to do it.

He’s going to cast himself into a pit.

He’s going to—

• • • •

I don’t know what to do. I can’t sleep. Or am I already asleep? I am sleepwalking. I can feel myself do it: rise out of my bed, making dainty little steps, making my first movements out of my room and out of the halls and into the dark, open air of the academy surroundings. It is my last day in the academy, and I see the artificial trees everywhere, glorified oxygen tanks, whirring and stirring in the night. I see the huge, towering walls that spiral up to deep space. I try to move, in my sleepwalking, but my feet are too fluid, too watery, too dancer. I try to walk with force, try to walk like a mech fighter, to practice the stances my teacher forced upon me.

And my body doesn’t allow it.

My head screams no and the stars in my throat pulsate in panic and my mech and my skin flow in the dark like a cape. My body swims and slips in my skin like a slimy catfish and immediately I start running, running, running off to someplace, to where I may resist, to where my dream might exist in reality. I have a headache, in sleep running, in wherever I am. I have a headache and so much confusion in my heart and I just want a lullaby. I just want to be sung to—that song.

That singer. They’ve been missing from my dreams. I can’t feel their voice. I haven’t heard them against the dark in forever. It’s been so long.

That’s all I want. That voice against the darkness, trembling, hoping for something yet raw, exposed, like me. Where is it?

No. Not it.

You.

Where are you?

The singer. You.

Where are you? How can I find you?

• • • •

He lifts his leg from the moon and prepares to jump.

He closes his eyes.

He—

• • • •

I stand in the silence, not knowing what to do. I don’t know what to think anymore, so I just start calling out to the dark. No. It’s not the dark. It’s you, singer. I’m speaking to you. I can feel you. I’m calling to the days of hope that you filled me with, singer, that this world is broken but for us. I know I’m not like you; I know I’ve not experienced whatever pain that you have, the same rawness that bleeds from your voice. But please. I’m speaking to you with a voice full of stars. Sing me to hope and sing us to rest. Whatever it is, whatever reason you’re silent—I am a voice in the dark.

I will cut through the void to find you.

I can help.

• • • •

Starsinger jumps down from the moon, voiceless. His heart breaks upon layer upon layer of atmosphere, gravity explodes under his weight. He can’t stop falling and can’t stop crying and can’t stop feeling that awful disappointing loneliness. Space is the endless dusk, stretched out like time, slow then fast again.

And then something stops him midair. No, not just something. He stops himself, in a way. He is restrained in the air, holding on to the stars, and he is forced to look up. In the distance, millions of miles far, there is a voice in the air that appears, a soft comfort, a slow heartbreak. There is a calling in the darkness, in the atmosphere, a begging.

I can help.

And Starsinger doesn’t even know what to say. He’s confused at first, trying to believe the words are real, trying to make sure they were said in his direction. The world is cruel and vast, the illusion of hope even more so, so Starsinger does not want to believe. It’s too hard for him to hope. He tries to brush it off, but then he hears the words again, and he hears them again, and he hears them once more.

I am a voice in the darkness; I will cut through the dark to find you. I can help.

And then Starsinger’s voice chokes on tears. He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t get it. He’s been believing for so long, praying and wondering for all his life, and he doesn’t understand why anything would happen now. He doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want to dream but the voice says please, and she says it again, and she says it once more.

I can help.

Starsinger closes his eyes, hands pressed tight to his chest and believes her. He has to believe that God hears him, that the world can be a force for good, that there are people trying to help. He has to believe there are people willing to understand, to acknowledge his hurt, to build a bridge over the evil of this world.

Starsinger’s chest hums and his throat burns with melody; he rises back up in the air. He believes. He looks up, back to the glorious weightiness of space, back to the stars. Oh how they twinkle. Oh how they shine. He believes and he believes and he believes that he can access the power inside him, that he can sing up to God, that he can break past the hurt of his generations.

So he opens his throat, in the glorious, glorious spark heart of space, and the Starsinger sings.

All light taken from my eyes. All who never lived to see the day. All my fathers and mothers who died on my journey. All the words and the prayers and the songs and the stories and the history and the legends and the folktales and my words, our voices, our legacies, bring them back to me, bring them back to me, bring my spirits back, bring—

The universe rocks. He stops singing. He can feel it: a door sliding into his chest. The stars stare at him in the sky, almost smiling, then they start growing and growing till they’re as big as the clouds. Big as the moon. Big as sky, and earth, where his ancestors once lived, and the whole universe. Bigger than space.

They’re here, Starsinger says, his tears forming bubbles around him. Oh thank God, they’re finally here.

• • • •

I am standing and asking and praying for your voice when the whole world explodes in white. Wherever I am, whoever I am, mech or human, I am thrown across the world, past the academy halls and past the trees and past all the mechs that lie across buildings. I am shattered across gravity, every layer of existence, exposed to a layer of space so bright that it overwhelms. Stars force their way out of my throat, slowly dancing out of my mouth. I can barely breathe or stand.

It doesn’t stop.

• • • •

Starsinger spins around the stars. He can’t stop looking at them: the ghosts of his family, of his spirit relatives in new forms, in new spirits, in different voices. They’re not the same as he remembers them, not the way he was before he was trafficked, not complete, but he remembers he isn’t the same either. He can’t stop crying. They grow like bubbles around him, like casings full of dreams. He can see it so clearly. Their ghosts. Their brightness. Their power. He holds on to every memory. He treasures every feeling.

Osarumwęnse sings to them in Bini and breaks his soul. He washes himself in their light and belts out songs like teardrops, like the words of a child to an old friend. His ancestors speak Bini to him, along with the language of the stars, and their voice comforts him. Heals him. They hear him. They see him. They know the world lies. They understand his plight better than anyone, and he hears from them that they needed to leave his mind to be safe, that they needed to disappear so he wouldn’t hate them like the rest of his trafficking memories. But he’s not in the darkness anymore.

He’s not in a world without power.

• • • •

He’s here.

The singer. He’s here, at the edges of space—and his voice; it’s a warmth beneath my skull, a comfort between my eyes. A lullaby.

He steps up to me. I am frozen in the antigravity of space. I can’t do anything but exist, stare in time. I don’t even know what to say, how to speak the stars so fluently again in all this nervousness. My heart whistles. My lungs sweat. But he just stares at me, smiling.

And then he greets me and whispers in my ear.

Warmth spreads through me. I smile. His name is Osarumwęnse. My name is Ęderun. I did not know he was of my tribe. When he speaks to me, I sing the stars, and he says them back to me, softly. He’s real. He’s real.

You helped me believe, he says. I can’t thank you enough.

I nod, slowly. I don’t understand him and what he means, but he speaks with so much joy, so much happiness that I can’t help but smile with him. When I look at my body, my mech is joined with me, fluid once again, and stars rest peacefully in my throat.

I need your help, he says, and a mech suit of stars appears right in front of me. It is beautiful and perfect and too bright to even look at. I want to free those being trafficked. I want to heal our world.

In my soul, I can feel his passion. I know what he wants, what he means—there’s a connection between us that runs across worlds. It’s like I’ve known him forever in this short time—he is my brother, my skin, my covenant, my spirit. The Singer—we both understand the stars. The Singer; I can’t dare deny this journey. I can’t turn this down.

“I’ll go with you since you need me. I want to help,” I say. “But I also need to stay on this asteroid and show those that are in the academy that things are not as it seems. They’re killing migrants, and so many of them think we’re defending the land. I want to show others that place is not what it is through my dance, through my softness. I don’t know if you can understand that.”

I expect him to say no, like all my teachers have told me. That I can’t be one thing or the other, that I can’t be something fluid and fierce. That I need to grow up. I’m ready for the disappointment of having to choose, of not being taken seriously. But he just nods and gives me my mech suit made of stars, and tells me to wait for my dreams, that we can go from there.

And on this night of all nights, I am on the verge of tears. Because now finally somebody gets it, and I am not bound to rigidity. I am fluid and stable; I am made of the stars. I am more than one being. I am more than one thing.

I can’t ever compromise that.

So, to everyone who has ever taught me: Thank you. You were right and you were wrong. You have known much but not all. You have never truly known what is best for me, or who I am, or who I want to be. But my spirit will not be shackled, and my dreams won’t be ruined. Space has never been my limitation. I look forward and within.

• • • •

And at the edge of the universe, Osarumwęnse carries hopes amidst the stars. He sings the songs he’s been long denied and holds his culture to his heart. His records are complicated, spread out all over the world. But there is still so much history to make, and so many new stories to tell. He stretches out a hand forward, to the dark, and he still feels it, cold and painful, even as a star. But free and shining and liberated, the Star is never hurt for long.