A Stellar Realization

I am tempted to say that I have always loved stars but, in truth, I grew fond of them around the age of six. Around this time, two things happened: I attended a sleepaway camp for the first time and my mother glued glow-in-the-dark stars to my ceiling in a desperate attempt to cure my fear of the dark.

Over the eleven years that I attended camp, it has grown to mean an array of different things to me--one of which lead to my appreciation of stars. I was too young at the time to understand them, stars that is, and that may forever be the case. Similarly, I believe that this naïveté only aided my fascination. The stars became my escape: my warmth. Just a glance into their compelling complexity and you could feel insightful, entranced, lost, and at home all within the blink of an eye.

It took me many years late to realize where the star's sense of warmth came from. They were so far away and yet they carried a sense of security. As I sat guarding the girl's area of camp one night, I heard a muffled sound coming from near a cabin. It only took a few quivering footsteps as I inched closer to realize it was merely a sad girl that felt too far from home. I took her hand, placed my robe around her shoulders, perched on a bench, and stared up at the sky.

After sitting in silence for a couple of minutes, I pointed up to the night and asked if she saw what I was referring to. Perplexed, she shrugged and in between sniffles muttered, "Of course I do. It is the sky: the stars". "Correct", I responded as a smile eased across my cold-bitten face, "those are the same stars that your mother sees. If she were to look out of her window right now and glance up, she would see the same thing as you. It would feel as if you were only an arm's length away, quite like we are".

I spent many more minutes gazing longingly up at the sky as the small girl rested her head on my shoulder, brushing off the tear residue that was left over on her cheek. At last I had resolved my previous confusion over the source of solace and comfort that lies within the stars.

The stars were not only mine, but something that no one could take away from me. They belonged to everybody and yet no one at the same time.

When I got home from camp I searched through my closet until I found the old jar of stars that was left over from my childhood. One star at a time I stepped onto my bed and strained my arm until the star stuck to my ceiling.

To this day I fall victim to the stars. On weekend nights I occasionally drive into the hills just to get lost in their euphoria. "Nobody ever looks up", I have often said. Sometimes the most captivating things in life are the ones that are free of cost and are hidden in plain sight.