It was snowing when I woke up this morning. My mum reminded me that it was my grandma's birthday. She told me that the snow was her gift to me.
Thanks grandma.
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There are a few things I don't like about living in the city. I mean, I can't imagine myself lasting all that long in the country, where the closest neighbour is a half hour walk, the closest bar is even further, and the closest cafe is even further, I think that despite how much land I'd have to run around in and how many dogs I'd have to placate my loneliness, I'd go crazy after a while, and in general I try to placate my tendencies towards cabin fever. But there's one thing that the city doesn't have that I miss desperately every time I'm there, and that is stars. Most of the time, though, I don't miss this lack, the sky usually isn't the focus of my attention most nights. Most nights I'm too enthralled by the constant light at eye-level, so my gaze remains landlocked. But the other night, I was taking a bus. Just after we got off of Montreal Island, I realized just exactly what a bus is when it whips across lowland farmland Quebec and Ontario. I started laughing in exhilaration at the absurd speed and wind I wasn't feeling at all. And my eyes turned skyward, and though the view was interrupted by the ghost glow of stranger's laptop screens and those dinky lights on Greyhounds meant to illuminate the world of one person reflected in my windows, I saw stars. I didn't see the whole beautiful pantheon, but I knew that if I could get everyone to turn off their lights, live with darkness, I could've seen them all, and I still saw more than I had in a while. It brought me back, screaming, memory-wind whipping my hair, to cold winter nights stargazing with my family through my mum's telescope, summers on the dock staring upwards, camping trips where constellations slurred into each other, and suddenly all I wanted was to be somewhere with no light, where I could find comfort in the infinite twinkle because the dark holds no hope.
So I miss stargazing, even though I've always lived in the city and the stars only revealed themselves to me in tatters through mists of light pollution. These brief exposures to the full glory of stars will never leave me.
And I'll tell you why I love the stars. The stars have stories only you can read. They're like clouds or Rorschach blots, only so much more abstract and precise. If you look hard enough, long enough, you can find any shape you want, you can read any word, phrase, sentence, novel, name. It's written in the stars, darling, because I wrote it there.
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