All That There Is To See

October 21st. It is 4 am. I'm standing outside, pajama pants tucked into my Blundstones, two different hoodies packed on over each other, standing stock still, head craned straight back at the night sky.

I don't particularly want to be out here. I'd rather be sleeping. But I am launching an exhibit of my work in two days and my internal systems have decided that this is a good time to start planning for anything that could go wrong. This is one bad night's sleep of many. But by now I know how I work and I'm going along with it.

In my efforts to do anything but the intimidating work of putting my artwork out into the world I've been researching celestial phenomena. Tonight I've been told is an excellent night to see the Orionid meteor shower. Clear skies. New moon.

The body of work (Out Here, In the Unknown) draws on ideas from space. Shooting stars. Twinkling lights shining out in the darkness. So I felt duty bound that, if I was going to be up anyway, to stand and witness the event.

I have a secret love of the unclaimed hours between midnight and early morning. Standing here in the empty lot next door I feel like an interloper.

There is the quiet that you'd expect. The neighborhood is asleep.

The space of the quiet is what gets me. How big it feels spread out around me. The wind blows through the autumn leaves overhead and I can hear acorns plinking off car roofs a dozen houses away.

The sky is clear. Constellations I don't know the names of gleam in the cold night overhead. The app on my phone said the meteors should be originating from of point just over the roof of my house.

So I stand there, head craned all the way back, waiting for my eyes to adjust, looking for little traces of light that I'm told could happen ten to fifteen times per hour.

I'm thinking about how amazing this all is. We are flying through the dust trail of a giant rock that's been hurtling through space for a length of time I can't begin to comprehend. Little bits of it flaking off and ending their eon's long journey in infinitesimally brief flashes of light over millions of sleeping heads, unnoticed.

I think about how I might be dead the next time this happens. Be it a decade or a day from now. I might be dead the next time this happens.

I was twenty the last time I stood outside looking for meteors like this. I was working in a dead end camera store, at a job my buddy got me, operating the machine that ate film and spat out pictures. It was a job, not a career, that came with a discount on film. It was soulless work.

The Leonid meteor storm of 2002 was supposed to be one for the record books. It was mid November the night we locked up the camera store and drove out to a field in the middle of nowhere.

It was freezing. I remember that clearly. Neither of us had planned ahead. So we sat there in this field, shivering, backs pressed together, chain smoking cigarettes to try to stay warm.

The night was overcast. We couldn't see a prayer of sky through the mud grey overhead. We didn't even know where to look other than up.

We sat there for hours. Talking about how the sky was bullshit. Laughing.

I remember feeling on the cusp of life back then. The last vestiges of my childhood burning away in the friction of the adult world I was joining.

2035 is the next Leonid shower of note. Thirty three years out from my twenty year old self. I remember thinking I might be dead for that one too.

So we sat there with the dedication of one sitting next to a death bed. In effort to witness the last words whispered by a trail of cosmic dust burning up over our heads. Cigarettes burning like little embers out there in the dark empty field.

We never saw a single shooting star. I don't think it mattered. All that mattered was that we were there for that moment. A brief flash. Never to be repeated.

Back in the empty lot next my house my neck is beginning to ache. Forty five minutes have passed. Just as quickly and as slowly as the twenty three years that passed before them.

I haven't seen any shooting stars. But I'm not sure that mattered much.

For a moment, just before heading back into my warm and patient bed, I close my eyes and breathe deep the damp October air, the quiet spaces between the branches over head, and all the years and worries of a forty year old father, and the dreams of a twenty year old kid, and all the years that came in between. And then I go inside and sleep having witnessed that which was there to see.