Arizona Stars

I'm looking up into the star sparkled Arizona night sky, lanced with the pin pricks of a thousand stars. Many of those stars are no more, burnt out; burnt away. Yet still the reach of their light arcs towards us across the great empty gulfs of space; a bright reminder to us of worlds we shall never know, for even as we admire their lights, they are perhaps for light years of time now, no more.

One day our sun will go out. Our own so-familiar planet will also be consumed and reduced to a spiral of dust. Yet even then, our messages, our signals and lights, will long have been beamed out into the emptiness, racing away from us as the speed of light. Long after all we are and will become has passed into forever, our story will still be eking its way across the great dark void of time and space, on a return message to those stars in the Arizona sky.