Over the last two months, a dozen students from three continents have been meeting to write and reflect as part of the Writers Matter program. The following piece is part of the “I Wonder” collection, and comes from N. Ostenfeld in Malmo, Sweden.

I wonder, does the moon know it’s loved?

Does the moon know it lives with purpose, does the moon know the love and adoration it has received, the countless pieces of art written and created in its beauty? 

A single rock, floating in solitude amidst a vast darkness—shining so brightly when nothing else does. A borrowed light, a reflection, nothing of its own. I wonder, how many of us are like the moon? Lonely, silent, yet dazzling only in the emptiness of night. Do we burn so others might see, only to fade when their world fills with light?

The moon, in actuality, is nothing extraordinary, just a simple rock, made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron and so on. Earthly materials. Uninteresting materials. Plain materials. Just stone and dust, the remnants of a violent past. A scar in the sky. Yet it draws poets, painters, dreamers, and lovers to its cold surface, offering them nothing but a reflection. The moon is our muse, just as you have now become my muse, an unfeeling witness to the longings we pour out, as if hoping its pale glow might soothe our restlessness.

Perhaps that is the moon’s cruelest beauty. It gives us nothing of itself, and yet we give it everything. Our words, our songs, our stories. Perhaps it mocks us in its silence, knowing we will always return to it, hungry for inspiration, searching for meaning in its emptiness.

The moon is loyal to the Earth, bound in quiet devotion, circling endlessly—not out of love, but because even in its loneliness, it has nowhere else to go. Your name meant loyalty and fidelity. You were my moon.

Perhaps, it is as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote; “Maybe the moon is beautiful only because it is far.” Maybe its beauty would vanish if we touched it, if we truly understood it.

 Maybe we love it because we can’t have it. Because it will never love us back.

I wonder, if the moon ever looks at us—at the chaos, the greed, the fragile hopes we scatter across the earth—and feels grateful it is so far away.

I wish I was your moon.