These Are the Times I’ve Looked Up Long Enough to See the Stars

A timeline of space exploration

1989

I’m lying in a sleeping bag on the floor of my cousin Becca’s bedroom. My parents are in the guest room down the hall.

My makeshift bed is right under an open window. The Minnesota sky out the window has more stars than I’ve seen in my life. I’ve never slept anywhere this far from a city before.

I think to myself that I don’t feel as scared of the dark here as I do at home.

1994

I’m sitting outside by a fire next to my fellow campers on our last night at Girl Scout camp. We can hear the next camp over singing melancholy songs through the trees. The sky is humid and thick with stars.

I think to myself that I don’t want this night to end, and I don’t want to go inside again. I wonder if I’ve ever been this happy before.

1998

I’m lying on a deck chair on a patio in Lake Chelan, Washington. I curl my sweatshirt tight around my body like a blanket, but my body is still warm from the beer. I’ve just spent the evening drinking far too much with my cousin and his stepbrother on the dock.

The lake water was pitch black. We competed to see who could keep their legs in the water the longest before getting too scared and pulling them back in.

My companions went to sleep inside and left me, the youngest, in the plastic deck chair outside. But I don’t mind at all.

As I drift to sleep, I stare up at the giant night sky. I count the shooting stars.

I think to myself that I hope I get so many more nights just like this one.

2005

It’s a sticky night in a hotel on the border between Senegal and Mali. My feet are suspended in a balmy pool, and the itchy cloth dress I’m wearing is tight around my ribcage. Bats swoop down to take a drink from the pool in giant arcs above our heads.

The sky is so wide. I close my eyes and lie back on the concrete, my feet still in the pool. I try to imagine the map of the earth and then find myself on it.

I think to myself that I’ve never been this far away before.

2012

I’m lying flat on my back in a garden in Morocco. My boyfriend and our other travel companion lie next to me in a row. They’re drinking beer and talking as they look up at the sky, but I’m silent.

I’m staring straight up and past the stars. I wonder where the stars end. I wonder about the last time I looked up at the sky for this long.

I don’t think I’ve looked up at all in years.

I stare up at that giant expanse of space and my brain can’t bear it. I start to cry.

2017

I’m standing at a memorial service for a 5 year-old child, a student at my school. His oncology nurses are standing next to me weeping as they watch the picture slideshow of his short life. His father stands up to deliver a speech. In the speech, he quotes Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

I barely knew this child, and yet I wonder if I have ever felt this moved by something before.

I think to myself that I will never forget this image of this father reading out loud about his dead son.

2020

I am traveling with my two dear friends, a January birthday trip to escape from motherhood. I decide to ask my husband for an open marriage. I decide to get my first tattoo. That image of that father comes back to me.

I choose an image from the Pale Blue Dot, a tiny dot with an arrow, for my left wrist.

I think to myself that I have been numb for so long. Maybe this will help me feel something.

2022

I’m driving my 6-year-old son down a familiar road in our city. We’ve just come back from a birthday party.

He says out of nowhere,

“What do you think is beyond the universe?”

“If there’s nothing out there, is it slowly moving toward us? Will the nothing get to us soon?

I scan the map of the world and find myself on it again.

This time I’m not so far away anymore. I’m right here.

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