Stars
June 8, 2009
“Fucking hell.”
The glow from the barbecue was dying with the light and your dogs sat panting and exhausted around us. I had come nearly two hundred miles from the capital to see you, but my eyes longed for your countryside as well as your smile. The stars were much brighter than I’d ever seen them from home and I was so out of my depth I had no words for what I was looking at. The closest I could come was “fucking hell.”
Later, I would look back at that night and remember huddling into the sleeping bag you lent me, full of the lager from the ice box and hearing all the unfamiliar sounds. Crickets, birds, the stream, and things I didn’t know the names of. I would remember it in my room while I stared at Canary Wharf and listened to engines and sirens and helicopters. I would think about that night again as I looked up at London’s night sky and felt disconnected from the drama I could hear.
I looked up at the off-black sky and wondered about light pollution and if the few stars that glimmered were only planets. Without you to tell me what was really going on up there it suddenly seemed like a large, lonely galaxy. I can smile again now, but I couldn’t see most of the stars from there at all, and because I no longer had you, I was foolish enough to think that meant they weren’t there.
