I feel so sorry for stars stuck in a video game. 

The stars shine in Red Dead Redemption 2 like they do anywhere else, in Boston or Bulgaria, or through the fake binoculars I make with my hands and point at a boy's heart. But when Red Dead stars look down, they see nothing. They pretend to look at me, Arthur Morgan, with a tired hat hugging my head and tuberculosis fucking my lungs. But they don't blink. 

They're blank, blank, blank. The sky in the 2022 space horror game The Callisto Protocol, which everyone hated except me, spreads Jupiter out into a caramel swirl, despite all the gore that gurgles beneath it. Its stars stand up against black velvet night, eight spider eyes ambling down your dresser, and preside over the gray moon Callisto. I'm playing Josh Duhamel playing wheezing Jacob Lee, and I wait for movement.

A shooting star crumbles across the night sky in Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town every five years, if the weather is good.

But what's the point? What can it see? 

Only me, playing a game again, wobbling through fake grass as a fake farmer. It’s unnatural. Without hydrogen, helium, and cosmic dust, there are no consequences. A star in a video game can't take part in real Heat, Horror, Blood-thinning, Ruin, Victory, Hunger, Cocaine, Relaxation, Plastic, Skin, Collapse, Fruit, Sugar, Kissing, or Insomnia. Oh, and forests, so many forests we're burning down.

A cloud, somewhere, moves over the incandescent sun. Someone, in Texas, tries to shut her closet door, but jeans jam the edges like its mouth is full of plasma.

In the dark portal that opens, I see it's all so sad. I lost my job when everyone else lost their job. 11 percent of Riot Games got laid off on January 23. While Brooklyn decided between thawing and freezing, 16 percent of staff at Epic Games got laid off, and 25 percent at Unity, 35 percent at Twitch, 17 percent at Discord, and so on. It was a long trip down the bathtub drain. I squeeze out orange thoughts about the games I used to play and magazines I used to read, but I come up with only a blank uhhhh wishing well.

Refresh Twitter — "I've given the last 10 years of my life to so-and-so company," so-and-so writes through tears, "and they got rid of me."

"6 Asians Vs 1 Secret White Guy," YouTube informs me and 1.6 million viewers. Two advertisements play before it. I had a Kotaku article bookmarked, but a half-screen Etsy ad set my phone on fire. I get halfway through another 3,000 words on Taylor Swift in the Times before I realize, 1,000 words in, I'm supposed to want to buy Midnights on vinyl. Taylor has it figured out — she's maximizing both love and carbon emissions.

"No image is allowed but the image of love," writes Bernadette Mayer in Midwinter Day. "Though it's more exhausting to love to write / than to pursue what might have been described," she recognizes later.

I sit down at my desk and hope someone will let me write. The full glass of water I haven't been drinking drips down into a careless ring. A brown cat skulks around my backyard, looking for more than wet leaves. Everything else is still.

It's just another day as a protostar — it costs my core 15,000,000 degrees to shrink somewhere near stability. I check my bank account a few times a week to get numb to it. I look out at wet leaves.

I circle the truth with a blue pen. "Consciousness is the truth of man," Derrida says.

We will post about it. We are jobless and crying. There are people out there who are totally caked in soot and others who have their hands crossed on their chests, refrigerated by snow. Snowflakes climb down the fence to make constellations in my hair, noticing my great shampoo — it contains chemicals made with lucky numbers three and seven.

Red giants are relatively cool about their spot in the cycle. Then it's lunch time again, before I could expect it.

I take my fork and heat up what I have to, letting steam from my rice, onions, chickens, and panic hit the ceiling and slide away. Hegel said in Phenomenology of Spirit that "with Self-Consciousness we have entered into the native land of truth."

Every passion has a price and a formula. Every Dutch still life has a red, dead lobster cut with lead white.

"The I that is a We, and the We that is an I."

Shared experience is an unreliable joy. No matter how good at video games you are, Arthur Morgan will cough up gunk and die.

So, naked in my childhood bedroom, I stick another glow-in-the-dark star to my ceiling, and I fall asleep.

In the spring of 1977, wild-haired Francesca Woodman laid on the ground in Providence and twisted herself into an origami star. 

She named the photos "On Being an Angel." In them, she takes up half the frame, and then only with her mouth (it's reluctantly closed in one photo, like she's hiding a dove in her throat), her shadowy eyes, and the white peaks of her breasts, aberrations in the wood floor's white dust. Her arms are crunched-up at her sides like mint candy in my molar.

Stupefaction is the truth of woman. I follow her lead and vanish into a dream.

I had a silver cake knife. I sunk it into New York City's smog to unstick the starlight center. I put my hand in, but came up with only a shuddering bowl of ocean water. For how long have I been begging a mirage for air?

Lazy. I veer off Rainbow Road and spin out into a flat night sky.

Lazy. All I have is my body.

And, according to some job listings, even that is up for sale. I'm left with nothing, then — as Woodman must have found, staring into her camera's reflective lens — but the repeating melody of myself. A high, then a low, twinkle, twinkle.