The Big Black Sky

I’ve decided to upload various pieces I’ve published over the years here over the next few weeks. Here is a piece called “The Big Black Sky,” which first appeared in a literary journal called Killing the Angel. It is also the foreword to my memoir on growing up with a chronic illness.

The Big Black Sky

            When I was a child, I couldn’t see the stars. Bad eyesight. I know my eyes once were good, but, of that time, I have no memory. There had been nothing for me to take note of, nothing in my perception of the world that seemed to differ from anyone else’s.  The change may have been quick enough to come between the annual or, perhaps, biannual vision screenings conducted by my elementary school, or it may simply have gone undetected. I do not know how long it lasted, yet for a distinct time I was unaware that the world was blurrier than it should have been. I thought everyone saw as I did.

            But there were the stars. The few stars I could see were fuzzy and gray, like clumps of dust, not the brilliant silver I knew they should be. During summer, my father used to trace the constellations. I would nod, my bare feet resting on moist, dark green grass, or the hard pavement of our driveway. “Oh, I see!” I would say. But I didn’t.

I remember him nearly shouting, “Hey! There’s one!” whenever a shooting star went by. My eyes followed his pointed finger but I could never find the star to which it led. All I saw was the big black sky. And I began to take note.

Fear grew in me those summer nights, at the vision screening in school; I was the one with a little something wrong with me. Then I got my glasses. “Wow, it’s so different!” I exclaimed, looking out the window at the detailed texture I could now see in the tree trunks lining the road on the way home from the ophthalmologist. 

Again, my father and I were outside, my father tracing constellations. I studied the stars. I looked at my father, then back at the stars again. The constellations didn’t look like the objects, animals and human figures I had been told about and seen illustrated up close. Not to me. And I took note again. 

I continued looking at the night sky by myself. I stopped hoping for shooting stars on my tiptoes, with my heart beating up into my throat. I gained a blurry idea of where constellations were supposed to be, though the idea of them began to make me smile. It seemed to me that throughout history people had been tracing those particular patterns in the dark because we are told that they are there. But standing underneath the sky on the clearest nights, I noticed that glittering silver lines seemed to connect the brightest stars sometimes, like the strings on a harp. Perhaps they were only an optical illusion, yet they seemed capable of making the whole sky music. No one had told me about them. At first, I thought maybe those lines were shooting stars, then I realized they were just connections shining all over and through the big black sky.