A shooting star is a reminder of impermanence. It exists for seconds. You see it, it's gone. The rock existed for billions of years in the cold dark. Then a brief blaze. Then nothing — or a rock in the dirt. We're not so different. Our lives are meteors on a cosmic timescale. Brief. Bright. Gone. But the metaphor cuts both ways. The meteor's atoms don't vanish. They join the air, the soil, the ocean. They become part of the next thing. The calcium in its glow might end up in a seashell. The iron in a blade of grass. In you. The universe recycles everything. Nothing is lost, only transformed. The shooting star doesn't die. It disperses. So do we. The wish you make? That's you reaching toward continuity. Toward the part of you that keeps going.