Stargazing
As a guy living in New York City, I rarely have the pleasure of enjoying the full beauty of the night sky. However, I still have my moments; moments where I can stick my head out of my bedroom window at two or three in the morning to witness the deep dark hues of the night sky juxtaposed by the bright-flashing lights of the city and its ever stretching skyline. In those moments, stretched out of a window, with a cigarette in my hand, and my head becoming light, I find some sense of peace, comfort even… Comfort in the blurred lines and edges brought on by the rush of my addiction; however I also see that the city is not the only light and the sky is not the only darkness. Between buildings, alleyways, the occasional hole-in-the-wall, places some of us may never be, the city is a gloaming; the sky, though they are so far away and barely noticeable, contains the glimmer of the stars. Stars that are millions of miles out of our reach, burning and wasting themselves away to leave behind in their wake a spectral sight of luminous beauty. It is these stars that I do not have the fortune to enjoy, it is these stars that I long to see. I have already seen the city and all it has had to offer, and in 18 years my eyes have grown old and tired from this so-called “sightseeing.” Even so, it was tonight I was able to gaze upon those stars down by the docks for the Staten Island Ferry. It was there five in the morning spread out on the pavement, my own urban variant of “stargazing” that I saw those celestial beings, opening the same weary eyes that had donned their veil of death long ago. I wondered what others saw in them. A sailor, for example, lost in the midst of a never ending sea, would probably see the constellations he remembers better than his own memories; the little and big dippers, Ursa minor/major, Orion’s belt, just a way home. An astrologer, the answers to all the questions in our lives, how long we live, how successful we will become or who we we would fall in love with; an astronomer on the other hand, he would find nothing but more questions with every answer he’d obtain, learning from these heavenly bodies that came to be born from nothing, coming into existence in a cataclysmic spark and fire of events, becoming everything that would expand to no known bound only to fall victim of their own entropy yet to be born again, all in one moment– the blink of an eye… a never ending vicious cycle that continues to this day and forever onward. Now a child, he or she would not see any of this, not with their innocence. They have yet to experience the formalities of life, the glory and heartbreak that we all must endure at least once in our lives. Lacking this, they would see just a awe inspiring site, objects to place their hopes on; so that when they may wake from their sleep their dreams would still live on, set to live on in those diamonds in the sky that for all they know had shattered long ago to nothing but the same dust from which it was conceived. And then there are those, too hung up in the hustle of their own lives, the stress and the drama, seeing nothing but stars, just those white shining things in the sky. As for I, what did I see? Well I saw all that the others had seen, I saw the constellations,the hope the beauty and the answers along with the questions, the loss and chaos in emptiness. But still I saw more, something else… In that sky I saw her. I saw the beauty she embodied, and just as I saw the stars coming together to form constellations, like dots on maps connected by a web of interstates and roads, an invisible image only seen by those who possess that certain ‘jene sais quoi’, I saw the same shapes and images that I traced the night we first met. Laying there in her basement, I trailed my fingers from beauty mark to beauty mark, over and over connecting the dots, lost in an incessant trance of conversation through touch; it was pure comfort, ecstasy, it just felt right. It was there laying down by the docks and earlier on the 1 train that I experienced this ardor again. The same passion I have yet to lose when I am around her, a magnificent girl I met only two days ago, it is her I see in the sky; but the ever more astounding, it is in her that I not only see all that the sky holds, but everything I wish to find in this world. It is in her that I see life…
-Seth Chaudhary
