We drive up the Bay in the dark, 80’s music playing on the blue lighted cd deck, OMD pleading with us that if we were to leave, we shouldn’t leave now and take their hearts away. We’ve got the sunroof open even though it’s a nippy 50 degrees. The night sky is clear and Perseus stretches and yawns, using his bow to reach an itch on his back while Andromeda buffs her nails. Esteban grabs my hand and lays eleven quick kisses between my knuckles. I trust him to drive over a ribbon of freshly lain blacktop without engaging in my normal watching for errant deer, badgers, Republicans, who might cross our path. Instead I just lean back and look up through the open roof into the Milky Way, a congested traffic jam of pinpoints of light, all coursing through space from eight million years ago. I can see how sailors would have looked to these, their guardians, the ever-present true north blinking low on the horizon. The Big Dipper fills a punch bowl of ink into tiny crystal cups that twinkle like laughter and somewhere I imagine amateur astronomers puzzling over their backyard telescopes, never getting the joke. Harold thinks that stars sound like a badly tuned radio whereas I always imagine that they sound a bit like Debussy’ random notes of discord followed by the loudest silence’ with a bit of a buzz behind it, like insects swarming over an upturned flower dripping with inky nectar. There is a cluster of three tiny stars that sailors used to test their eyesight. I could always see one or two, but now I can’t even remember where they are. Are they in Orion’s belt or the weird little remora stars on one of the Dippers? I don’t recall. The cluster, I believe, was actually a nebula, a giant star nursery shooting little baby stars into the void. The moon is swollen and orange, pregnant in the night sky. It’s like we’re on a movie set, how she’s so orange and harvesty and huge. She’s third trimester, this moon, and wishing she could just sit down and put her feet up and maybe have someone rub them just a little, wouldya.
Esteban pulls into a dark corner of a park, shuts off the car, and leans his head back together with mine, our hair mixing together, and together we look up into the night together. The smell of his aftershave is tangy in my nose, mixing with the dry shuffled card smell of the dying leaves and what can only be described as a touch of snow on the wind. Snow is something before it becomes snow and what it is smells like snow.
With our heads together like this, I wonder what we were before we became who we are now and what we sounded like then and if we stopped and looked at this same night sky. It is so clear that you can easily discern the murky puddle of nebulae and red dwarfs and blue giants instead being limited to only the superstars of the night sky. I trace the lines of one constellation with my finger in the air.
‘W?’ Esteban whispers.
‘Cassiopeia,’ I whisper back. Years ago, on a hippy retreat in Northern Wisconsin, my sister and I had laid on a saddle blanket still smelling of barn and hay, munching on sunflower cookies and sesame honey cakes while an ancient Native American folk singer told us stories about his ancestor’s sky, including mixtures of Indian constellations and new meanings for the familiar ones. Cassiopeia was a revolving woman, then, always circling the north.
‘Weetyopeia,’ He whispers again and tilts to kiss my cheek. I circle north and come back again.
