#fluoroscent

Byungjoo’s eyes shone with the new glow-in-the-dark stars he had bought for his room, as he switched off his bedside lamp to look up at the ceiling, watching the green light, eyes opened as wide as he could for as long as he could, believing that they would stop glowing as soon as he blinked. A smile formed on his lips as he looked at the greenish tinted stars on his ceiling. He really like stars and now, he has them in his room.

The night was eerily cold, his windows were open and every gust of wind pricked onto his skin, but he never thought of pulling his blanket up or moving over to shut the windows. He began to notice the real stars out of the window, and with each blink he could see more and more of them. They were beautiful and they don’t blink and twinkle like the song says, they stay and watch. And it occured to him how as the numbers of visible stars increase, the sky still remained vastly uncovered, despite the bits of white, the pitch black stayed. It doesn’t make sense.

He never liked satellites, they pretend to be stars and they shine the brightest, they covered the sparkle of what was an actual star. Because of that, Byungjoo was never satisfied that he could never tell the difference between satellites and real stars, even more so that he could tell the fake ones off his ceiling from the ones outside anytime of the day.

There were a lot of things Byungjoo heard about stars on the sky, realistically and metaphorically. He wasn’t an astronomy student and he never really wanted to clarify them either, sometimes ignorance is bliss. Like the one he heard about that the stars that shine only do so because they’re dead.