Night skies and light years

I love how a shaft of light enters my new room to tell me it is morning. It reminds me of my old room when I was younger; how I can lie in bed and stare out the window, watch the sunrise or sunset or moonrise.  I had a view of the skies and the stars and on bad days I used to wish upon them even though I know it’s all malarkey. There’s something about being a kid that’s simple and provincial.  Whatever loneliness is washed away by stars, popsicles, and ice cream.

It’s so far from that now.  I haven’t stayed or slept in that room for a very long time, not since I graduated from high school.  It has become an empty room, a storage for old, unused things.  I used to visit it when I go there, but I never stayed long enough to sleep.  Sometimes, I’d sit by the window at night and watch the people passing by below like I used to.  The view of the sky hasn’t changed much.  The stars, the ones I used to wish to, are still the same. Only I felt different.  I’ve stopped wishing on stars.  I see them as globes of fire behind their twinkles.  There’s a science to them, a logic to why they twinkle, why they’re a lot less brighter than the Sun.

Science took away all the magic, but not the awe.  I remember this one time, I was sitting outside a dorm in UP and I looked up at the night sky.  I wondered how many of these I see are still burning bright, right now that I’m seeing their light from a million light years away?  So much history has passed since light traveled from the star to this world.  Those that shone now will be seen by descendants into the very distant future.  I’ve read somewhere that stars are the simplest time machines.  We’re able to see light that had come and traveled from the past.  

I guess that’s why I love looking at the night sky.  It reminds me of a much simpler past.  Not so much as wanting to go back through all the confusion and angst of growing up, but a reminder that I was once young, with all these memories, having lived this life and walked this earth with not much to myself but a wish and a dream.  Like the starlight that has slowly traveled in light years and through the void, there’s a point to all this, a destination or a destiny.  The present may have been very different from how I imagined it from the past, but that’s the context of a journey.  It changes everything and it gets you somewhere.  Sometimes it’s in the middle of nowhere, but still somewhere.