I like a lot of cliché things in this life, stars and rain for example. If you ask anyone you meet, they’ll probably tell you that they love one or both of those things. But most of them are liars. If you run from building to building when it’s drizzling you don’t love the rain. If you have the radio on while you’re driving in a downpour, you don’t love the rain. If you are not willing to dance with me because of the fact that by the end of it we will both be soaked to the bone, you don’t love the rain. I really, really do love it, and I am sad when people who claim they love it too won’t as much as step foot in it with me. Rain is beautiful; rain is the age old cleansing symbol, dating back to The Great Floods of Gilgamesh and Genesis, rain supports the lives of all living things, rain makes me happy.
Stars make me happy too. I’ve been known to lay on the sidewalk for half an hour after everyone else has gone inside, just looking at the nighttime sky. If rain is beautiful, stars are whatever comes next. Stars take it a step up. I don’t like it when people say they look at the stars at night, and they live in the city. Because if you live anywhere remotely near civilization … you aren’t looking at the stars. Sure you can see some, but there’s no way they can be appreciated to the fullest extent from your balcony overlooking an alley. Here on my bed there isn’t a “city” for more than four miles in any direction. Light pollution is virtually nonexistent here. Sometimes when I lay on my back in the damp, cold, grass of late nights and early morning I find myself in a state of mind where I’m almost completely incapable of standing up. Although a pop song has expressed these sentiments before I could, it’s as if I can forget the world. I feel insignificant, which some people would say is depressing, but there’s something about it I like. I have never had someone to share stargazing with me, and I assume if I ever find someone who actually enjoys the stars, and isn’t just in it for the cliché, it will be one of the most wonderful moments of my life.
From my position on my bed I can see the nighttime sky clearly. There isn’t a single cloud as far as the eye can see. Looking at a swatch of sky through a telescope created by my curled fingers, I find myself completely incapable of describing what color nighttime is. It certainly isn’t black, it’s a deep blue, but then again it isn’t blue at all; it’s more of a beautiful, dark purple. But even that doesn’t seem right to me. I wonder if anyone else has ever done this before. It’s making me smile, but it also frustrates me. I wish I had a Crayola crayon that was this color. There’s no moon tonight, but earlier this week there was. And it was one of the most splendid moons I have ever seen. It was bright to the point that I could have wandered the countryside and woods and fields that surround our property without any sort of flashlight until daybreak. I was tempted to go outside; it was almost as if the moon was pulling me the same way it does the tides of the ocean. At that moment it was easy to see how full moons could make people do crazy things. But tonight, no moon. Just hundreds of thousands of tiny, twinkling, stars. An infinite number of pin pricks in a magically colored tarp, stretched from one corner of the world to the other. And that’s really enough for me.