Night fell slowly, the anticipation building quietly but serenely. Pinks and blues and yellows turned into olives and oranges and maroons, the light never fully giving way to shadow. The darkness shattered the sun into a million fragments, the pinpoint stars reflecting celestial prisms, poking through the blackening canvas.

“Look there, it’s a falling star,” the electrician said. “Better make a wish.”

I thought you could only see them in dreams, but here was one, although we all knew it was a meteoroid. We made a wish anyhow, a collective inhaling of a precious hope. When we exhaled, we knew we’d given it life.

“How could you ever count these without losing track?” said the hygienist. “I’d probably fixate on one too long and forget what I was supposed to be doing.”

But we turned toward Orion, the Big Dipper, the Seven Sisters, verifying the septet of the last one but trying to include stars just outside the typical constellation boundaries. For fun, we looked for different objects and gave Orion a flowing sash to replace his belt and the Big Dipper a wide-mouthed jar to fill. For the Sisters, we found Eight Brothers—one Sister will have to make a tough decision and one Brother will have to make do with Aldebaran, the red giant, a fiery mistress if one ever existed.

“They say that when we die, we become star dust,” said the broom salesman. “And that when it rains, it’s our loved ones crying. I’m not sure I can wrap my head around that.”

It doesn’t need to be true for it to be something we can put a little faith in, a different kind of heaven to believe in than the one we’re usually taught about. What a wonderment to think that our loved ones shine down on us well after their deaths. What an honor to think they’re crying in comfort or with joy with us as we navigate life without their earthly presence. But now we have their universal guidance daily.

Nothing, though, is truly infinite. Even in this beautiful galaxy we call home, all things shall end. Nothing lasts forever. But there’s still beauty in that because we can feel grateful to know we’re being replaced by something as marvelous as ourselves, as the stars, as the dreams we share unceremoniously and unabashedly and without embellishment. We know our time will come, hoping we make the best of the time we have—together, apart, solitarily.

We see stars as they are in the past. They’re too far away to live in the present, too magnificent to exist in our plane of time. That means they see us in the future, the time travelers who made it through. Who have touched a moment in time they might never. Who don’t question how star dust or tears from stars or anything else that quantum could ever be from the present or impact us now or do anything simultaneously with us. If we get caught up in these quandaries, we lose sight of the magical, the beautiful, the believable.

As we leave the planetarium, we’re struck again with a singular, collective thought: If you hang out with poets, musicians, and actors, you get dreamers. If you hang out with stargazers, you get dreams.

Christopher Stolle’s writing has appeared most recently in “San Antonio Review,” “Flying Island,” “Tipton Poetry Journal,” “Last Stanza Poetry Journal,” “The New Southern Fugitives,” “The Alembic,” “Gravel,” “The Light Ekphrastic,” “Sheepshead Review,” and “Plath Poetry Project.” He’s an editor for DK Publishing and he lives in Richmond, Indiana.