stars@dartmouth

The night sky is bigger here than it is back home. It's not an orange-rimmed black cloth, hung limply between the trees with faint holes pierced through here and there, it's an endless expanse of scintillating darkness, a big deep swath splatter-painted by an invisible paintbrush. Stand in the middle of the Green and tilt your head back any time after six o'clock and there'll be nothing keeping you from feeling high off the ground, utterly surrounded by stars.

Last night (this morning? College has its own time zone.) was Leonid's Meteor Shower. At ten thirty I biked home from rehearsal in the Hop, finding my way in and out of orange patches of light cast by streetlamps, a cup of Collis pasta (when you come here, you'll know.) clutched in one hand and my handlebars in the other. My head swirled with dreams of finishing the research paper I had due the next day before one o'clock, sleeping til three, then slipping out of bed and under the sky to watch the show. At one o'clock, my paper was far from complete and my best friend was longboarding his way to my room -- I sat staring at the stack of books on my desk, vaguely contemplating the notion of staying up all night and finishing my paper rather than going to the meteor shower.

My friend burst through the door. "I'm so excited to see this with you!" he cried even before hello. I knew then that sometimes papers can wait -- that sometimes life offers you the opportunity to learn something beyond the walls of your classroom, offers you an experience that you'd be unwise to turn down. We reminisced about our friends back home til three, when we added innumerable layers to our preexisting outfits, linked arms, and trooped off into the night.

Lying on a hill of the golf course, I felt like my back was arched with the curve of the earth itself. I wasn't a part of the universe, I was something entirely separate from it -- being alive, I had not yet played my part, I was yet unseen. We all lied there, gazing up at dead stars, beautiful, sparkling supernovas whose funerals we were all persistently attending, and my friend turns to me and says, "Seeing this doesn't make me feel insignificant... looking out into infinity makes life seem to matter that much more."

How often can one say that? How often can one come to the realization that the majesty of life is comparable -- greater -- than the majesty of the stars? As the meteors gently cut the sky, all I could think was this: always take the opportunity to live. Be thankful for a place where you pass half the campus walking around at three in the morning, their necks craned backwards, gasping collectively as a star shoots across the sky. Leave your homework for a while -- it'll be there when you get back -- and go out with the people you love who love you back and live a while, lose and find yourself in a moment, be forever indebted to the community that cultivated those feelings in the first place.