6/5/10
In the morning, it is quiet.
The night left us with blackness. We had had no flashlight. Heather had her guitar in one hand, and I gripped her arm tightly so that my knee banged against the guitar case. It had rained, and the paths through Camp Ohiyesa were muddy and slick. There was not even enough light to cast a reflection dimly on a puddle at our damp shoes. I smelled the wetness in the air. I was afraid, but I could not help but to stop and look up at the stars.
“If the clichés are all true, Heather—millions of years old, the light of the stars.”
She looked up, said nothing, but I knew she felt it. There was doubt, there was distance from the beauty. Millions of physical miles. Millions in our minds, detachment from the universe. There was the beauty, though. We stood enveloped within it. The stars were framed by the tops of trees leaning in to form an oval expanse of dark navy heaven. Their infant lights crowded together to fill the space above, small and twinkling; and, too, at once, their ancient gaze, wise and ghostly, and we the same, or so I hoped. There was the cool night, and there was the fear of what we couldn’t see or name or touch in all of the blackness of the towering trees and masses of shrubs, the blood-sucking mosquitoes, the quiet nothing laying out and around us, a clean sound canvas for the croaks of bullfrogs who spoke to us, genuinely and calmly in a language we could only hear—no hope for understanding. I still gazed upward, still clutching her arm. The stars spread before us.
