Teen Ink

“Up, Daddy!” I pulled my father’s pant leg. He took me into his arms and lifted me onto his shoulders. From this vantage point, I could touch every atom of our universe. My father turned to my mother, who hovered nearby, and asked her to find her favorite star. She pointed wordlessly to somewhere far away. With greedy hands, I stretched to pluck the twinkling fruit from the heavens. I cradled the treasure in the skirt of my nightgown, eventually passing it to my parents. My mother stored our treats in her pockets, which swelled yellow and ripe. We three berry-pickers snacked on strawberry stars for dinner.

***

There’s something about summer that gives happiness urgency. Consciousness lounges slothfully on our porch, swinging in a hammock, waiting for us to realize the swiftness of approaching apocalypses. August sunsets beckon us to embrace initiative, to make the most of those last few afternoons before school.

In the afterglow of one such summer evening, I saw for the first time the eerie light of yesterday-today stars. My father lifted me on his shoulders, and my mother held my hand. She asked me, “Did you know looking into space is traveling back in time?”

“Some of the stars are so far away, they are already gone,” he added.

As any little kid might, I feigned familiarity with the ways of the universe, pretending this wasn’t news to me. I was too small to understand the implications of this revelation anyway. Little girls shouldn’t have to know that the night is contagious, ever-burgeoning, and all-consuming.

But tonight, I am older, and I feel for the first time the distance between what was and what is. We live in the stars’ shadows; their past is our present. I can feel the universe expanding and the darkness growing. Somewhere in that space between past and present, the power of free will is so much responsibility. Can I really decide to be happy? If so, is unhappiness self-imposed?

***

Everyone knows that stargazing is best under distilled summer skies. As soon as I was old enough to connect the dots in coloring books, I was tracing constellations. I remember my starry night coloring book, the way it smelled like Play-Doh and my mother’s eccentric cooking. I dog-eared my favorite constellations, like teenagers push-pin or flag a world map full of dream vacations. I liked the taste of words like Andromeda, Centaurus, Sagittarius on my tongue; their aftertastes were big and foreign. I felt like a grown-up, making something so enormous in the sky fit on the paper in front of me. Wielding my Crayola markers with growing deftness, I brought order to chaos and beauty to the mundane. I loved hearing from my parents that my lines were straighter, my dot-counting skills better. These ­accounts of my progress made me feel powerful with potential, and that’s a good feeling.

As a child, I spent most of my summer days willing them into nights, when stargazing was feasible. At morning breakfasts, I traced constellations and ate Life cereal, but I wasn’t allowed to look at the sun; my mother told me its rays would eat my eyes.

Many afternoons, I would lie on my back and try to make shapes of the clouds, but they didn’t make sense to me. They were too big, too unwieldy; I always got lost in the blue between. But the night, the stars could be mapped – they could be mine.

My parents were my telescopes. My dad would tell me about the science of stars. With vast gesticulations, he would build me black holes, big bangs, asteroids, planets. We lived together in this tangible world of adventure, pursuing answers. He would lift me, hold me safe to his chest, and then whip me around in orbit. “Boom! Thunder! Crackle! Pop! Shh! The Milky Way is busy,” he whispered into my ear as he whirled me through extraterrestrial trajectory.

My mother sang to me, O Muse, the great Odyssey of history-blurred mythology. Cooking macaroni and cheese, she told me about Sisyphus and his boulder. Driving to the grocery store, she described Zeus and his lightning bolt. Most importantly, though, my mom told me that it was my job to redraw the constellations. “What do you see?” she’d ask, but not in a way that makes you think there is a right answer. “Show me, Strawberry.” My hand in hers, I traced my own picture, made my own myths, defined my own heroes.

When dusk finally arrived (pity those poor, deluded children who are afraid of the dark), my family gathered on our porch for dinner. After the meal, I rushed to claim the hammock, my cockpit at the threshold of day and night. As I rocked in this cradle, the stars above me blurred, and I drove myself dizzy. In time, my parents finished the dishes and emerged from the kitchen to save me from my sky sickness. Their soft weight on either side of the hammock slowed my orbit, bringing my world to a gradual, buoyant stop. We floated there together, part of the universal everywhere, interrupted only by the rush of a passing car, some surprising semblance of others.

Together, we soared through space and time. Leaning out of our aircraft, I touched my coloring book constellations, momentarily tangible in slow motion. I believed that my imagination, my ideals, would always be accessible.

***

This summer place was ephemeral. We left love hanging there, like water vapor words in yesterday’s air. That fall, I grew too tall and jaded for picking berries from my father’s shoulders. My coloring book was replaced by the burden of math textbooks, clocks, and perpetual preparation. New York City stars are eclipsed by competing industrial lights and other remnants of humanity’s edifice. My schedule is scratched with ballpoint pen expectations; I am always starving for more time.

My memories of early summers are just that – memories. They are probably qualified, maybe delusions. I’m not sure whether to believe them. You probably shouldn’t. This I remember, though:

At the end of last summer, I found myself divided and at war, struggling to keep my family together as their marriage fell apart. He saw stargazing as a science; she experienced constellations as artwork. After trying for so long to save them from themselves, I watched the moon melt, dripping from the sky, blistering on my tongue. The trouble is, nothing breaks equally, and something’s always lost. Trying to make one into two, crumbs fall. Something cut up probably won’t fit back together, and I fear I will always be incomplete.

Sometimes, when I am caught between two places, neither of which is my home, I wonder if I’ll survive in the gray. I am between black and white; I am neither. Will I just bleed away, stretched so thin, like ice on a lake? I am solid, but step carefully, so deep, wet, cold.

We don’t spend our summers under the stars anymore. Stranded on Earth, I found music (the Beatles sing “Straw­berry Fields Forever”) and discovered pretty people, pretty words. Even so, I was sad like the sky, seeking the context of everything, even fleeting moments of happiness.

I started using a night light. Before sleep, I would silence the moon behind curtains and dismiss the stars as planes. I curled up in fetal position, a coiled momentary eternity, detached from the extremities of my mind and body. Night became a means of escape: I spent as much time as possible in the darkness, where I could be numb and unconscious.

The other day, I found that coloring book. It was in a box, blanketed in dust, buried among other memories. Flipping through the pages, which still smelled of Play-Doh, I found that I remembered the constellations. I closed my eyes, painting the Big Dipper on my eyelids. Stars endure. They are unaffected by the happenings of earthlings.

In time, I wrote these words. I used my memories, whether fabricated or accurate, to map the stars. As it turns out, city lights – those of apartments, advertisements, car blinkers, stoplights, desk lamps – are stars too. I live here, among my pieces, defining my own constellations.