Now I Can See the Stars
by Miriam Klein
There was a comet in the sky a few weeks ago. I couldn’t find it. I saw a real comet once, when I was very young, just looking up. But when I was not much older—nine, ten at most — buildings started to grow around me. At first they were just confined to a few streets and it was easy to avoid them, down a hill of violets surrounded by poison ivy, through to the fields. But the buildings grew bigger, spread out. They needed their space, and the sky was just in the way. They didn’t want to be so obvious as to scrape it. It was so much easier just to be brighter than stars and eat away at the blackness with orange lamps and rectangles of metal, brick and glass to physically block what they couldn’t outshine. Brick and glass and light, and the lights were more colorful, and the lights were in easily defined shapes, all the dots helpfully connected for the viewer.
A few stars got through anyway. They usually do, especially if you try to find them, but you have to stay up too late or climb rooftops illegally and wait in the cold. But even those stars are hard to see and people started to give up and stay inside, even on warm nights, even on special nights: “I didn’t bother with the Perseids,” she said the next day over cold coffee, “I couldn’t even see Perseus.”
I bothered: I lay down on the ground at midnight in a stadium parking lot with a cardboard star chart and tried to forget streetlights and trained myself to ignore the slower movements of airplanes along the edges of my vision, waiting for the quick streaks and flashes. I lay there for a long time, more than an hour, a time that should have been measured in sixty lines. I think I saw twelve. But I didn’t give up. I know how fast the stars go: some close to the speed of light. They’re retreating, leaving us. Everything is trying to escape—the moon is moving away from us too, getting a tiny bit smaller in the sky every year.
And as all this gets farther and farther away the buildings and the lights approach, and we gain warmth and we can see where we’re going but we can’t see where we are: even many miles from the city the Milky Way is dimmer than the reflections of neon and sodium vapor. The Milky Way takes too much time, far more than the immediately pretty cityscapes — the cityscapes, for all their showiness, are pretty, and just as they’re always willing to expand and come closer, stars always pull back and only expand when it’s time to die. And everything under the skyline wants to help you, with shelter, with directions and instructions and aesthetically pleasing angles. It’s just an accident that even when they’re not giving you a roof, they’re still erasing the sky and every time the power isn’t out, I lose another night. I lost my chance to see that comet, and someone owes me forty-eight meteors, and thousands of visions of the Milky Way, and someone needs to help me take them back.