One Pale Ribbon

My cheek is cold where it presses against the glass of the car window. I huddle deeper into my winter coat, trying to keep warm, but I keep my eyes trained on the night sky. I know that the northern lights are not like meteorites, where if you blink you’ll miss them. But I watch for the aurora the same way, regardless. 

We’ve already failed to see the northern lights seven times. It’s always the same. Every night I check the NOAA’s Space Weather Forecast, hoping that the green band will revolve around the globe and expand enough to cover this part of Alaska. If it does, if there’s a chance, my sister, my brother, and I pile into my grandmother’s little white Buick and drive just far enough out of the city to where the sky is unblemished by artificial lights. 

There’s one spot we’ve haunted for the long, dark nights of the Alaskan winter. A road, near enough to a residential area that I feel safe stopping there, but where there are no lights. It’s not perfect–pine trees frame the sky on either side like jagged shadows blotting out the stars. But it works. I pull off the road, tires crunching on packed snow. I turn the engine off, so all the lights go out, but we don’t get out. It’s a bit too frosty outside for that. Instead, we wait in the dark, trying to preserve warmth and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. 

We wait for hours, the numbers on the clock creeping past midnight. We strain our eyes searching the sky, until the stars become tattooed on our eyes. Did the sky change in color? Are the lights starting? No, it’s just a thin cloud staining the sky. Is that a glow of light? No, it’s always been there. The artificial lights of he city bleeding into the night. Is that a movement of light near the horizon? Yes, but not the aurora. It’s a passing car, blinding us with its headlights. We groan, and wait for our eyes to readjust. 

We wait until the unrelenting darkness eats away our resolve. We wait until the cold has seeped into the marrow of our bones and our joints creak with frost. And then, eventually, but inevitably, we have to say enough and drive home. My sister and brother still peer out the windows, hoping for one last glance that will turn us around again. But the sky refuses to change for us. So we spill out of the car, cold and with heavy-lidded eyes and stumble into the house and into our beds. 

And we try again another night. 

Tonight is another attempt. The cold is biting tonight. My toes are starting to go numb, even though I wore two pairs of thick socks. If it gets much colder I’ll have to turn the car back on, just to get the heater going. 

Sometimes, in the midst of the Alaskan winter, it feels as if the cold has taken up residence inside me. It’s not the cold seeping into my skin, but cold emanating from my very core. Sometimes, when both day and night are so frigid that breathing the air hurts my throat, I doubt that I have ever been warm. 

I moved to Alaska in the middle of a January blizzard. Not to see the northern lights. Not for some grand adventure. Not even to rough it for a couple years as a way to “find myself.” I moved here because I had nowhere else left to go. 

I was fresh out of college, applying to grad schools and to jobs to try and support myself, but nothing had come through. At the same time, my family suffered a betrayal from an extended family member, who forced us out of our home. My parents had tried their best to find a place for all of us, but housing costs were skyrocketing, and they couldn’t find a place with room for all of us that they could still afford. And so I moved to a small town in Alaska in the middle of winter to live with my Grandma, to find a job, and in part to escape from the pain the past year had brought. My sister and then my brother followed me up here shortly after. 

As we sit in the cold car, waiting for the northern lights, I play music from a playlist I’ve cobbled together–mostly songs from Adam Young’s scores Voyager 1 and Apollo 11. The one that plays now is The Lonely Three, meant to evoke the travel of the first three American astronauts to the moon. The song is a solitary electric guitar playing an almost haunting melody. As it plays I know it’s supposed to represent the journey of the three astronauts, but right now we are The Lonely Three, my sister, my brother, and I, huddled inside a small white car, surrounded by the unrelenting night and the frigid cold of the Alaskan winter, searching the unchanging sky for any glimpse of light. 

Sometimes, in the midst of the Alaskan winter, it feels as if the darkness has taken up residence inside me. I go to work early in the morning, when everything is still the shades of gray of the night–black sky, the white headlights of the car, the black shadows of the mountains, the dull white of the snow encrusted on the roads and in heaps from where it has been plowed. Far from my grand plans for my future, instead of working as a travel writer, I work in a coffee shop. The sun won’t rise until much later, and it sets early, in the middle of the afternoon. When I get out of work, the sun’s already gone. Every day starts to feel the same. All the colors of my life bled out into the monotone colors of one long winter night. 

My memories of Alaska were always good–mostly set in the eternal sunshine of the summer when the mountains were green with life. But living here was a different story. While my Grandma was lovely to live with, and I was grateful for the time I got to spend with her, my aunt was not. Every time she came around to the house, I tried to become a ghost, unseen and unheard, darting around the corner whenever she approached. But even ghosts couldn’t escape from her keen ears, and eventually I always had to face her undeserved wrath. Her moods changed like the wind, and you didn’t hear the storm coming until it was too late. One night she came tearing into my room unannounced, threw open my closet and began yanking clothes from the hangers. I don’t know what had set her off. Perhaps I had cleared the table from dinner too quickly or breathed the wrong direction. Whatever it was, it made me an “ungrateful bitch” and she was taking back everything she had ever given me. My Grandma tried to stop her, as she always did, but what can she do against someone much younger and stronger than she is? 

Another time I got in trouble with my aunt because she tried to go off on my sister about talking too loudly. It’s not my sister’s fault that she gets excited about her work and wants to share it with others enthusiastically. She shouldn’t have to suffer undeserved derision. So my aunt’s wrath turned against me instead. She screams at me, while I hold my hands together in front of me, clasping them so they will shake less. 

“Why are you still here?” she screams at me. “Go home! Go somewhere you actually belong!” 

Her rant continues, but I can’t hear anymore anyways. Doesn’t she know that I have nowhere else to go? This was supposed to be home. The home I knew doesn’t exist anymore. The house where I lived with my family is gone now, sold, transformed into a different place altogether. And my parents and my other brother are struggling to find someplace new, working long hours at every job they can find just to stay one step away from homeless. We’re just doing the best we can. 

Sometimes, even though in the southern part of Alaska we still get a few hours of sunlight during the winter, it still feels like total polar night. When was the last time I saw the sun? Do I even remember what its warmth feels like? Instead, winter feels like one long night, stretching out forever, until it's all I can remember. The girl who hiked to the tops of mountains in golden sunlight, looking out at the world awash in color and anticipating exploring it all is no more. 

Condensation is starting to fog up the car windows. My fingers are going numb in my gloves. The last strums of the guitar are fading in the song. My sister leans against the dashboard, peering out the windshield. My brother is in the backseat, leaning his head back against the car door, head tilted to better see out the window. All I see is the inky sky, the emptiness of space only faintly speckled with the glimmer of the distant stars, and the pale gleam of hard-packed snow on the road. 

Another failure. The lights once again refuse to show themselves to us. I reach for the keys, still dangling from the ignition. 

“Em!” My sister begins tapping me urgently on the arm. 

“Look! Do you see that?” my brother says from the backseat. 

“What? Where?” I say. 

They both point, my brother at the window, my sister at the windshield. Pale light moves faintly in the sky. Could it be…?

We get out of the car without taking our eyes off the sky. The frosty air bites at our noses, and stings our eyes. I have to dab away the tears that spring unbidden to my eyes at the cold. 

A long, thin ribbon of white light weaves through the sky directly above us. It is a pale white band, slowly undulating like a streamer rippling in the wind. I lean back against the car, fully tilting my head so I can see the whole length of it. The northern lights. At last. After so many tries, so much waiting, so much straining to see any change in the sky. And here they are, right above us. 

All three of us watch in utter silence, mouths agape, eyes drinking in the whole sky. The aurora ripples above us in slow waves of pale light. It moves like a carpet being unrolled. That doesn’t quite capture it. The aurora is light that is alive, light dancing along the waves of a beach, light unfurling in the darkness. 

The night which had been heavy, leaden with winter, has become electric. The cold no longer gnaws at my bones but instead falls over me like a shock of cool water. I’m fully awake now. I’m alive now. The stars and the snow, one distant and one melting away at my touch, now seem to sparkle instead, greeting the northern lights above us. 

It’s not the grand show that others have seen–with glowing spears of green and pink or bright swirls of dancing color. It’s no firework of bright bursting light. Just one pale ribbon, slowly swaying overhead. But to us it is everything. A glimmer in the middle of a long polar night. A moment of awe after hour upon hour of unfruitful waiting. 

We end up standing in the empty street, stretching out our arms to the sky as if the aurora is a stream we can trail our fingertips in. In the middle of Alaskan winter, in the middle of the night, we lonely three reach up to the glittering sky. We laugh, our breaths clouding the air before our faces. We dance, swaying along with that one pale ribbon of light.