Such a good night. One of my best friends was in town tonight, down from Springfield, so Dylan and I headed over for a night of welcomed relaxation and nothingness. We sat outside on the porch, in the dark, talking, for hours. Talking about life and death, space and time travel, the past and how fucked up we were and still are, and how, sometimes, we are such bad people but good just the same. People and nothing more.
It was one of those nights you savor, a night where you forget about everything else to remember the past and consider the future as you discuss your fate, and our fates as humans, how the curse of Griswold lingers, killing so many young people, and what to do in the oncoming zombie apocalypse, the end of the world, and where we stand in the heart of everything, and how aliens will someday either destroy us or save us from destroying ourselves.
It was a night that made me feel, and really remember, that I’m so young even when I sometimes feel old. Between how this summer has played out and that my sister is starting college so soon, I have felt old at times, but most of the time I feel like I’ve always felt and will truly always feel. Young, especially at heart, and now more than ever, never taking a moment for granted.
All night, through so many different and random discussions, I cranked my neck toward the sky and stared into space. Countless stars tonight, clusters so deep they boggled my mind and still do; I cannot wrap my mind around the infiniteness of the universe, how when I look into the sky I’m seeing countless miles, so many years, away. It gives me a welcomed headache.
I listened to the conversations, and took part in them, and told my own stories, but truly, I was lost in space as I so often am. My neck hurts. I’m always lost in some form or another, it seems. Nearly four hours of studying the same stars and clusters, and one star so bright, and amazingly, nine shooting stars tonight. Nine. I don’t know if there was a meteor shower or something, since nine shooting stars in one night seems outlandish. Each was amazing, almost more so than the last.
It’s frightening—how deep I get into my thoughts when I’m looking into a night sky free of clouds and other obstructions. I thought about my past, to events as recent as this summer, and I thought about space and pondered what I was looking at, that there’s so much opportunity and possibilities in such an infinitesimal pocket of the sky. There’s so much beyond us—beyond even our ability to comprehend and process. It is said, and proven as much as any science can be proven, that everything that can be happening right now is happening right now, everywhere, to everyone; try to wrap your mind around that—the infinite dimensions that exists everywhere.
The night was crisp, so that some clusters of stars truly were countless, the dots so numerous yet so small that they created nothing more than a white aura cloudy in its infiniteness. It was beautiful and hypnotizing and kept me fascinated for hours and hours. It made me feel sort of crazy—but I am sort of crazy—studying the sky with such focus that I was silent for ten or twenty minutes at a time. Even now I know I cannot explain myself well—what I feel.
And tonight returned some things so fresh and tender, but the sky, the night sky, tends to do that. There’s history up there, and a future as well, and memories and possibilities, and some nights you just want to lay on the ground and stare forever, and everything will be good because you need nothing more. There’s the sky, and the stars, and you, and no need for more.
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