a brief love letter to the night sky
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
It is believed that Galileo Galilei, one of the greatest pioneers of science in the world, had once spoken those words. Truthfully I think, Galilei must have had no other love in his life if it is true that those words are his to claim. For I had discovered, already at the brittle age of six, that once you have given your love to the night sky, the stars in your heart will leave very little space for any other interests. It was at that age I discovered all the astronomers who have lost themselves in the night sky, in order to help us understand it better. I read books about Galileis' famous fight with the church, about Kepler and Newton, Stephen Hawking and Einstein and their great discoveries about the way our planets and the earth are supposedly aligned in this galaxy. My fascination for the stars never quite wore off, even after I had recognized that I would definitely have to use mathematics to gain any further knowledge.( I have never hated maths for that matter, I was simply not too fond of numbers at the age of ten.)
But my love for them inevitably expanded, on the very first night of the international lockdown, on the 13. March 2020. There was not a sound outside of my window. It seemed, that even the birds had heard of a deadly virus and had taken their leave. No voices, no lights in the city, no smoke from the industry sites. The only thing that had remained constant, were the stars.
From that night onwards, I unintentionally made it a habit to sit on my window sill every evening to watch the night sky. Sometimes I would already sit at sundown, eagerly awaiting the darkness, while basking in the light of the star that is nearest to us. Other times I would wait until everyone had gone to sleep and just stare. Stare, until my eyes were watering from the spring coldness and I had to climb down and wait for the next night to come. In these months, I did not only learn the constellations by looking up, but I learned to see my thoughts, learned to look so closely at the sheer endless amount of little sparkling dots, that I would feel my insignificance. I would always remember those nights.
And not once was I afraid of the silence, the dark. For I had learned to love it, for now, I knew, that there were a thousand sparks alive above me, which were there before I was born and would stay there, long after we will all have left this earth.
In the end, Galileis' words damned me to a life in which I would never be able to live without longing for the stars.
