The first story I ever remember writing was about a boy who became an astronaut and then turned into a star. The first short story I wrote in high school was about an old man fishing in a pond trying to catch the bobbing reflections of the night sky. And the first personal essay I wrote in college was about a spiritual epiphany I had while following the Milky Way on a dusty Ecuadorian road.
If I ever publish a book, you can bet the nighttime expanse will be prominently featured.
I don't know what it is about the heavens that so distracts my subconscience. I mean rarely do I purposely think about the stars and the blackness in between, but it seems that every time I put pen to paper my thoughts automatically reach upwards. I suppose it's akin to coastal people writing and thinking about water. As I consider it, many of my fondest childhood memories come from the back seat of our family car. On long drives home from who-knows-where I would lay in the back seat and stare out the window into the heavens until I fell asleep (or pretended to fall asleep so that my mother would carry me into the house). It was as if the arm of our Milky Way somehow held and rocked me in the darkness.
I remember the first time I noticed that my Cradling Galaxy was missing from the sky. It was the Fourth of July. My parents had divorced several years earlier and I was just starting to notice the strangeness of their relationship. Deep inside my stomach swelled a murky green storm as I watched my father try to light a firework, fail, get advice from my mother, mutter something under his breath, and hand the unlit menace over to her in an overly macho way. It was, quite remarkably, the first time I realized that they didn't love each other. I was 8 or 9.
That night I slept on the lawn with my older brothers and sister. They fell asleep almost immediately and I was left to shoulder what I believed to be an infinitely unfair and lonesome burden. For in my mind, I believed that I was the only one, youngest though I was, to come to this loveless realization. And it was too cruel and the storm was too green for me to ever share the news. I was 8 years old. And I was scared. I was 28-year-old scared. I was 87-year-old scared. I was 3-month-old scared. And as my eyes instinctively looked upwards, I cried. My starry mothering arm had melted away into a big-city sky. There were a few mocking stars. And the sound of my sobs. I was alone. I 8-year-old cried.
Oh Ellie, please don't ever turn 8. But you will. You will probably turn 8 when you're just 5 or 6. You will turn 8 before I know what to do. My baby bear cub, my angel, please remember this: God is Love. And that forever.
