The Dark Side of the Moon

A short reflection on the relationship between the Earth and the Moon.

When you look up at the moon, do you ever stop and think about what mysteries could lie behind the ivory curtain? What stories are etched into the stone craters we'll never touch?

Most nights, you don't. The moon is backdrop, not subject. A prop in your evening sky decorated with distant stars and planets.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you pause. You glance up and feel the weight of missing someone who used to share these moments with you. You remember conversations you whispered to that silent witness, confessions made to something vast enough to hold them. You notice how the light catches the edges of craters, how each phase emerges from darkness like a secret being revealed, each one as marvelous as the last.

Maybe you wonder about the distance. How something so far away can feel so intimate. How those scars and imperfections, visible even from here, somehow make it more beautiful rather than less.

I've been thinking about this for months now. The moon sees all of Earth. Every sunrise, every shadow, every hidden corner of our world. But we only ever see half of it. One face. One story. Forever locked in the Earth’s rotation.

It's like that friend who knows everything about you. They've witnessed your 3 AM breakdowns and your quiet victories. They've seen you stumble through your worst decisions and slowly rebuild yourself afterward. They know the version of you that exists in dark moments, unfiltered and raw. But only you know what they choose to show. You're bound to their carefully curated presentations, their public face, and maybe even their perfectly performed smile. You know there's another side, but you'll never know what it looks like when they think no one is watching.

This asymmetry haunts me. Not because it's malicious, but because it's inevitable.

The moon's “hidden” hemisphere isn't actually dark, of course. It receives the same amount of sunlight as the side we see. It's only dark to us. Only hidden from our perspective. The "dark side" glows just as brightly. We're simply not positioned to witness it.

Those moments when you step outside during a party to catch your breath, when the social mask slips for just a second; that's your dark side catching light coming around for another rotation. The hours you spend alone, working on something that matters to you, pushing through doubt and fear and the voice that says you're not good enough, that's your dark side, radiant with effort. The small acts of kindness no one sees, the internal battles you fight and win in silence, the dreams you tend like gardens in the quiet spaces of your life - all of this exists in the light. We just can't see it from where we stand.

We do this with people constantly. We assume that what we can't see must be shadow, must be absence, must be something to fear. We fill in the gaps with our own anxieties. That reserved colleague must be hiding something sinister. That friend who doesn't share their struggles must not have any, or worse, must be lying. We forget that the unseen can be profound. Tender. Quietly magnificent, beautiful even. Something never worth hiding.

I thought about the people in my life who only ever saw one phase of me. The ones who mistook a half-moon for a complete story. The relationships where I played a character so convincingly well that I forgot it was a performance. The professor who knew me only as the eager student. The friend who only saw my confidence, never my doubt. The family member who still sees me as I was at seventeen, frozen in amber.

And then I counted how many times I've done the same to others. How many people I've reduced to their visible hemisphere. How many partial glimmers I’ve replaced with the full moon.

The moon's dark side isn't frightening because of what's actually there. It's frightening because we project our own fears onto the unknown. We assume the worst about what we can't touch, can't verify, can't control. We write ourselves a fantasy of thoughts and emotions that ends in the story collapsing in on itself like dirt covering a casket.

But the truth is mundane and miraculous at once: it's just rock. Cratered from ancient impacts. Imperfect and weathered. Lit by the same sun that lights the side we know.

Just hidden from our view.

Maybe the goal isn't to see everything. Maybe the goal is to hold space for what we can't see. To remember that everyone carries an entire world we'll never fully know. To trust that the hidden parts of people, like the hidden parts of ourselves, are neither shameful nor dangerous, but simply… there.

Complex. Human. Worthy of the same light.

This reflection changes how I look at the moon now. When I see it hanging in the sky, I don't just see the familiar face anymore. I see the whole sphere, the complete story, even the parts I'll never witness. I see it as it actually is. Not half of something, but something whole that I can only partially perceive.

And maybe that's enough to change how I look at the people around me. How I look at myself. How I hold the beautiful, terrible fact that we are all complete stories masquerading as excerpts in everyone else’s eyes.

The moon doesn't need me to see all of it to be whole. Just acknowledge that it’s there.