The Stars We Still See

           On a Thursday night in the dead of winter, in a state where the word “winter” meant almost nothing, the world was made only of boxes on paper. Some of these boxes were crossed out, but far too many of them were not. One of these unchecked boxes sat next to a homework assignment that was not due that night, but had to be done that night anyway, because if it was not, then it would need to be done the next day, and the next day already held its own set of unchecked boxes.

           My left hand twisted into the fabric of my pants, and my right hand sat on the trackpad of my laptop, refreshing far too many times. I could see what the problem was, but I refused it. It couldn’t possibly be true, because it would displace all my boxes, and the world was a set of boxes on paper. After far too many clicks, and far too much of the same screen, I stepped out of my bedroom and into the living room.

           My entire family was already there, which half-confirmed what I had already suspected, but I asked anyway.

           “Is the internet out?”

           My mom looked up from a book. She wasn’t always my mom. She became my mom at the same time that the words “best friend” melted and spread out into something closer and more familial.

           “Yes. It’s a city-wide issue. From what I saw before it went out, they’re saying the whole city might lose power for a while, too.” I heard dishes clinking in the kitchen, and I remembered that I had put off dinner to cross off a few more boxes.

           “Did you see anything about how long it’ll last?”        

           My mom shook her head as my dad, who had not always been my dad, stepped out of the garage with a big, battery-powered light.

           “It shouldn’t be too long, but I didn’t see anything precise.”

           We all looked around the room at each other, and then the room went dark. My dad clicked on the camping light, and everyone in the house followed its glow to gather around the living room, crowding like moths. I bit the inside of my cheek, thinking of all the to-do’s that needed to be done, and my best friend pushed a warm mug into my hands.

            “Come outside.” They spoke like they were giving me life-altering news, and I followed them outside, mug of hot chocolate in hand. My awareness was tucked squarely away in my mind, orbiting all that needed to be done, rearranging things to account for the changes. The screen door closed behind us, and my best friend gestured for me to look up.

           It was as if someone had reached up into the sky and deepened it, pulling down great big handfuls of darkness to reveal whatever lay underneath. All the streetlights and trees and houses and cars stood as empty silhouettes against the dim light of the universe. The moon was just short of full, and I nearly closed my eyes to imagine the perfect, speckled darkness we would’ve been swimming in if it were only a sliver. Instead, I pulled my eyes away from the top of the world and put them on the center of it—my best friend next to me, cat-covered mug of hot chocolate held tightly in their hands.

           Their head was tipped back almost all the way, like someone basking in summer rain. I wondered if they could feel the stars pattering onto their face, falling from the sky in an endless drizzle.

           Looking not at the sky, but at this moonlit rapture, I thought that the universe should collapse into this again; lovely people standing under a million tiny things that are far larger than we will ever need to understand. I wondered how we let the ground get so far from the sky, how we flooded the space in between with fluorescents and smog.

           I looked back to the stars and found constellations I’d only ever seen in books. I pointed them out to my best friend, and they pointed some out to me, and I couldn’t imagine that the world could possibly need to be any bigger than that. I couldn’t imagine making it smaller than that, making it into boxes or centering it on planner pages.

           My best friend and I sat down on the driveway, sipped hot chocolate, and studied every piece of an endless sky. The brightest parts, the parts that we could see on a regular night when the world was still glowing, stood out like landmarks on a map. We could have jumped up into the atmosphere and danced around them, never losing our place.

            “Isn’t it amazing how those are always there? Even when we can’t see them, they can see us,” I said.

            “It makes me feel small, looking at all of them,” they said. I looked out a million miles into the sky, and I felt it, too. I felt smaller, and I felt lighter.

            “It’s nice to feel small, I think.”

            “Yeah.”

           We sat that way for a long time, until we’d sipped our hot chocolate down to cold, watery dregs. Once the universe had shown itself for long enough, the world turned back on around us, in a flickering display that would never rival the stars, no matter how long it tried. The stars had been there forever, and they had far too much practice. The chunks of dark we had pulled down plastered themselves back up over the sky, hiding the stars we had just met. It was like I could see their echoes in the spaces they had taken up, and the sense that they were still up there, seated deeper in the sky, did not leave me. It gave the universe a sense of depth and distance I had never been able to truly grasp, and the smallness did not go away, either. I was small, endlessly small, so the world must be immense. The world could not be one box, or two, or five. Those boxes were smaller than even I was, and the stars could not wink at them from their great distance the way they winked at me and my best friend and our empty mugs.

           I thought they might stand to go inside, but they didn’t. The stars we could still see, the ones that had guided our dance among the new stars, were still worth seeing. They were beautiful, tiny things that were larger than we would ever need to understand, and we were such lovely people beneath them.

            “We should do this more often,” I said. “Sit and feel small.”

           My best friend nodded, and their upturned face caught the endless drizzle of the stars we could still see.