A Confession of a Selenophile - 'Oh, Look at the Moon'
I don't know why I love the moon as much as I do. I once heard that if you cannot explain why you love someone or something, that is where true love begins. Perhaps that is what this is. There is no single reason, no neat explanation. I simply do. Sometimes I ask myself: Who am I without this love for the moon?
On the days when exhaustion sets in, when I am heavy with moodiness and want nothing more than to quietly disappear from the world, I look up. I look at the moon. I cannot explain the mechanics of how it heals me, but it does. On nights when I told the sky everything I could never bring myself to say to another human being, the moon listened. It holds all of my untold stories, safe in the dark.
Nature has always known how to restore a broken spirit, and for me, that healing nature takes the shape of the moon. It is a quiet, permanent obsession. The peace it carries cannot be fully captured in words, but I know I will always be the person who stops in their tracks to say, "Oh, look at the moon."
My camera roll is essentially a long, unstructured love letter to the night sky. I could stare up for hours without tiring. Even when fractioned in half, the moon knows how to captivate a heart, proving
that some things carry a breathtaking beauty precisely because of the distance between us.
In many ways, the moon is too far to touch, yet close enough to feel much like holding affection for someone you can never truly have. Some nights, talking to the moon feels infinitely warmer than talking to people. Some nights belong entirely to its silver quiet.
There is an unspoken intimacy in being someone who falls in love with the Moon. While the rest of the world demands bright clarity and direct sunlight, a selenophile learns to find solace in borrowed light in the soft glow of Earthshine illuminating the shadowed curve of a sliver crescent, proving that even in darkness, nothing is ever truly lost.
We are creatures made mostly of water, pulled by an invisible gravity to the moon that shapes our ocean tides and settles our restless sleep. To look up at its pale, dusty surface which spins so perfectly that it only ever shows us one face is a comforting mystery. Something nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away, slowly drifting further each year, can still make us feel so deeply held.
Like the moon, we too must pass through phases of emptiness to feel full again. That is its gentlest lesson. After long days, I often end up looking up with blurry eyes filled with tiredness, unspoken dreams, and words left unsaid. And still, without judgment, it stays.
I often wonder how many other hearts are looking up at the exact same moon in the exact same second. We all share the same sky, yet every single person carries a vastly different story beneath it.
To some, it is just a distant rock in space. But for a selenophile, it is medicine. It is solace. It is therapy. And it serves as a quiet reminder that we don't need to be the sun to make a difference. Reflecting even a small sliver of light into someone else's darkness is more than enough.
