The Stars Will Know My Name

The Stars Will Know My Name

I do not fear the blaze or burn,

But something deeper and hard to turn.

A wrath unseen or a  shame unspoken,

A silent judgment so harsh and broken.

I fear a God who looks away,

Who leaves me trembling and cast astray.

Who sees the cracks within my soul,

And deems me far from ever whole.

I fear the hush that follows last breath,

The vacant eye of certain death,

Where I dissolve, unnamed, and alone,

No voice to call this dust my own.

Where those I love keep trudging on,

While I, forgotten, am long gone.

Not out of cruelty, but ongoing of time,

A fading echo just lost in rhyme.

I do not seek celestial crowns,

Nor jeweled robes or godly towns.

I seek remembrance. I seek grace,

A whisper held in time and space.

A Savior who with open hands,

Still walks with me through shifting sands.

Who knows I doubted, feared, and fell,

And loved me in those shadows well.

I miss the temple’s reverent hush,

The sacred light and the quiet rush,

Of veil and vow, of hands held tight,

A glimpse beyond the mortal night.

I long to trust what once I knew,

To walk where saints and angels do.

But still I ask, what if we made,

These hopes from ache, not heaven-laid?

What if belief is just the skin,

We wear to hold the ache within?

And yet, I hope. Through all I see,

That hope itself has divinity.

I want to write in living flame,

To forge my legacy from name.

To press my soul on every page,

And lovingly haunt the hearts of every age.

I want young girls I’ll never meet,

To read my words and feel their beat,

To say, “She bled and still she bloomed.

She loved aloud. She sang. She presumed.”

I want my husband’s gentle smile,

To stretch my name across the mile.

To say, “Her love lit up the dark,

She left the world her brightest spark.”

I want my children’s children told,

“She was a storm wrapped up in gold.

She carved the sky with poet’s fire,

She made the fragile things aspire.”

And when my soul slips through the veil,

I pray the light is soft and pale.

A warmth that sings beyond the shore,

Where pain and dread exist no more.

Where God is mercy, deep and wide,

And angels walk with arms flung wide.

Where stars recall the love I gave,

And grace will write it on my grave.

So no, I will not die unnamed,

Not while this cosmos stays untamed.

Not while my fire still dares to glow

And build a world from all I know.

Let silence come, and death make claim,

The stars, not fear, will know my name.

05/25/25

-aubsthepoet 

The Ache to Be Eternal

There is a particular ache that lives in me, I mean, it is soft but relentless, like a low fan setting noise,  beneath all sound. It is not loud enough to silence joy but it is always present, like a thin layer of frost beneath the soil of every blooming thing. It is the ache of impermanence… of knowing that one day I will not, or may not, exist. Not just in body, but in thought. In memory. In breath. In light. I fear death, yes… but not the way most people mean it. I do not fear a peaceful end or the finality of old age. I fear the emptiness. The void. The nothing. The chance that consciousness might end with a whisper, that my soul might evaporate into blankness, unnoticed and unmissed. That life continues without me, naturally, and that those I love… who once held me, laughed with me, fought with me… will cry at my funeral but then wake each day, brush their teeth, make their meals, love their life, and, eventually, forget.

And I fear even more the possibility that there is not nothing. That instead of silence, there is shame. That the mistakes I made, the times I doubted, the moments I raged or questioned or stumbled… will somehow be counted against me. That I will be punished. Banished. Separated from God and from love. And I fear that such punishment would not be because I was cruel, but because I was unsure. Because I was tired. Because I could not make myself believe hard enough. I do not know which outcome terrifies me more… the unfeeling void, or the merciless deity.

And still… I hope. That contradictory ember glows in me even when I am at my most desolate. I hope there is more. That death is not the closing of a door but the opening of a sky. That eternity is real and not invented. That we existed before this, that we chose this life, that we will rise again in a beauty beyond imagination. I want to believe that. I ache to believe it. I remember what it felt like to belong to something larger, to be part of a people with structure and sacred story. I remember the temple… the echo of quiet, the smell of peace, the feeling of divine order etched in marble and ritual. I miss it in the way a child misses home, even when they’ve outgrown it. I miss hymns I don’t quite believe anymore. I miss prayers that once felt like wings. I miss the clean lines of doctrine, even as my heart keeps coloring outside them.

Sometimes I wonder if we crafted the idea of eternal life to soothe the unbearable knowledge of our mortality. If we invented heaven not from arrogance, but from need. If we wrapped ourselves in stories so we wouldn’t collapse beneath the weight of our own ending. And if that’s true… if it was all a creation of human desperation… then isn’t that, in its own way, sacred? Isn’t the collective yearning of billions of aching souls a kind of divine act? I don’t know the answer. And that uncertainty haunts me, even as it sets me free.

Also… I find myself drawn to dreams more than doctrines these days. Not because they are true, but because they are honest. My sleep is a field of fears, and from it grows the strangest fruit. My subconscious plays out every possible ending… obliteration, punishment, exile… and I wake breathless, grasping for meaning. But these dreams are also how I survive. They force me to dig. To question. To write. And it is through the writing that I stitch something together… a makeshift faith, a patchwork eternity made of metaphors and stardust. And in those quiet hours, with Google Docs on my phone in my hand and a tremble in my spine, I begin to believe again. Not in doctrine. Not always in God. But in love.

Because more than I fear death, I long for legacy. Not fame, not spotlight, not ego. But echo. I want to be a voice that stays. A name spoken not just out of memory, but reverence. I want the words I write to slip into the future, quietly but unmistakably, like perfume left in an empty room. I want young poets to find me and feel less alone. I want my children’s children to say, “She lived with fire. She loved too much. She made sense of pain and dared to make it beautiful.” I want to live in books, in stories, in stardust. And maybe that longing is my version of belief.

And I want love. More than I want heaven, I want love that cracks the air. I want to hold my husband’s hand in places we’ve never been. I want my skin to taste all the ocean has to offer everywhere. I want to sit at crowded tables with those I cherish, knowing there’s enough light to go around. I want my love to be so big, so blinding, so undeniable that the world must speak my name… not from obligation, but awe. I want to be known, not only for my mind or my talent, but for my tenderness. For the way I stayed. For the way I loved even when I was afraid. That is the immortality I crave.

Some days I hope in Gods existence with a fierce aching. Other days, I think we’re all just stars pretending to be people, floating through chaos and pretending it’s a map. And most days… I’m somewhere in the middle. Too hopeful to be faithless, too logical to be devout. I think God, if He exists, knows this about me. I think He would understand. I want Him to. I want a God who doesn’t flinch at questions. Who doesn’t recoil from my doubt or punish my searching. I want a Savior who sits with me in silence and doesn’t try to fix it, but instead says, “You are not alone.” That, to me, would be heaven.

I’ve written about these fears so often that people think it’s all I write about. But how could I not? How could I not chase the question that burns at the center of every human heart? I romanticize survival not to avoid the dark, but to make something lovely out of it. I find the shimmer in the ache. I press gold into the cracks. I write about song, child-like wonder, mountains, love, birds and flowers not because they’re small and I romanticize them, but because they do matter. Because they are proof of life. Proof of soul. Proof that I am still here, still trying, still breathing. And if there is something beyond this life, I believe it is built from such moments. Not grand miracles. Just small loves, repeated faithfully.

And so I gather these fears, these questions, these fragile hopes, and I place them like stones in the river of my writing. Each one a weight. Each one a prayer. Each one a wish for continuation. And I believe that if I arrange them just right, they’ll hold me up. That even if I never get the answers, the asking will have mattered. That love will have mattered. That the ache to be eternal is, in itself, divine.

I want so badly to believe in the teachings I grew up with. I want the restoration to feel like home again. I want the sealing ordinances to feel more like a promise and less like a question mark. I want to return to the temple without feeling like I’ve betrayed my hope. I want to sit in sacrament meeting and hear hymns that don’t sting with what I’ve lost, but sing with what I still hold. I want to believe in a pre-mortal soul. In eternal families. In divine design. And even when I cannot believe, I still want to. And maybe, just maybe, God honors the wanting.

One day I will die. This is inevitable. Maybe it will be in sleep. Maybe it will be in pain. Maybe it will be sudden, or slow, or quiet, or unseen. And maybe after that… nothing. Or maybe… everything. But until then, I will write. I will love. I will reach out across time with ink and heartbeat and ache. I will build my altar out of metaphor and memory. And I will hope, with all that I am, that something eternal sees me.

That when I go, I will not vanish, but transform.

That death will not be a thief, but a page turn.

That the stars, not fear, will know my name.