“Is the sun really a star?”
Trevor didn’t turn his gaze from the sky. He just nodded.
“Is the moon a star too?”
This time, Trevor looked at me with a mixture of condescension and amusement as he answered,
“What about the moon reminds you of a star?”
“I don’t know. You just told me the sun was a star, I don’t know what the requirements are.”
Trevor turned to look back up at the stars, peace returning to face. I hadn’t seen him this calm in a long time. Trevor had been struggling with the pressure of graduating but in this moment, his mind seemed to be at rest.
“The moon reflects light from the sun; other than that, it’s just a big ball of dust. A star is bursting with energy; fire burning so bright, we can see it from lightyears away,” he said. “Do you know how far away some of these stars are? How bright does a star have to shine to be visible to the naked human eye? I can’t imagine being on fire like that.”
“Trevor, they’re stars. I don’t think they feel the fire like we would,” I laughed.
“Yeah, but if they could, I bet they’d be miserable burning that bright. All so we can look at them and see their beauty. The least you could do is be grateful,” Trevor looked at me with half a smile. He had stars in his eyes. The calmness of his spirit was so evident on his face, I couldn’t help but release my own tensions. His joy was contagious.
I looked back up at the stars and let out a big sigh. I could see why he loved this so much. Normally, we couldn’t see the sky so clearly but we’d lost power on campus that night. Not even thirty minutes after the lights went out, Trevor told me to meet him on the front lawn.
I’d heard Trevor talk about how he missed seeing the stars without city lights but I never knew what a difference they made. With street lights and buildings all lit up, it was easy to ignore the stars in the sky. When everything around us was as dark as it was that night, I could finally see just how bright the stars were.
As we lay on the grass in silence, I traced patterns in the sky. Games of connect-the-dots formed hearts and faces while crickets chirped their unsynchronized songs. I don’t know what they were singing about but I imagined they sang happy songs. How could they sing anything but happy songs on a night like that?
I wish I’d known how bright stars could shine before then. It seems like they deserved to have been admired longer. It might have been too little, too late but on that night, I was grateful for them.
That was the only time I ever saw the stars so clearly. Eventually, power came back and the buildings returned to their regular illumination. It didn’t take long for me to fall back into old habits. I would look for the stars every night for almost a week after that night in the grass but they never came back. Another week passed, and I’d forgotten them all together.
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