I believe that Dad encouraged my stargazing because he saw my fascination with the night sky as we rocked in the ancient swing set in the back yard, as he watched me discover awe for the first time. I had questions that he couldn’t answer, so we bought books, charts, measured the azimuth of planets, learned the names of constellations. We sat in silence in those same swings as we tracked the faint reflection of Friendship 7 through the heavens as it carried the first human on a journey through the sky and around the earth. I was ten.
Sometimes on these walks, as I lay on my back and look into the stars, I feel like I’m relearning a language that my people spoke in my youth, before we crossed mountain ranges and oceans and arrived, years later, as refugees in a foreign land. I’m searching for the names of things I need, for the verbs that will tell me how to close the circle that the orbit makes. I close my eyes and listen. Memory rambles on for a while, Dad’s weekend whiskers, the Kools, the smell of the grill that lingers after the burgers are long gone, the Mimosa tree in the neighbors yard. Finally, memory runs out of breath, and wanders off to take a nostalgic nap under the locust tree.
Silence follows. Just the sound of human breath, my breath, deeply in, slowly out. In on a long count to ten, breathing out the same. The idea is to concentrate on breathing until you’re not concentrating on anything.
Suddenly, there’s another breath upon my face, softly, like a lover just waking up, rolling against me. My skin comes alive, as it would. My body quivers, my heart races, my mind flies – it is the breath of stars upon my skin. It turns out, they remember me, too.
I open my eyes. The stars are gone, it is the clouds caressing me, sweet and close, as a lover would, after a breathless kiss, as we return to sleep.