Night walker.
There’s almost nothing as fulfilling for me than to be able to walk by myself and look at the sky. Especially here in La Jolla, where the lights are mandated to be an odd shade of orange in order to protect some biological marine species or whatnot. The nights have become a new way to track time, and that the immensity of the night sky has become my new sunrise.
Until I moved here, I never knew what the big dipper looked like. I never knew the deepest shade of the sky. That it could have a texture, and that every time I stopped to look up, my knees would weaken from a subconscious fear that I would be hurled up into a nebula of black velvet freckled with distant burning spheres of gas.
And every time I look at the sky and see the stars scattered all around, like the sequins left in your room after a night of dancing at a gay club, it makes me wonder how people, generations before me, had found so much comfort in it. People made sense of it, people understood it. Explorers who had nothing to go on based their travels on irrelevant bodies millions of miles away. Astronomers had drawn pictures in the sky, adding order to the spinning chaos and the earth’s movement in relation to the stars.
And maybe the reason I sometimes get so scared of the night’s vast empire is because we’ve built lights to cover it, to make sense of the night close to the ground. I only wish I had looked up more often.
