So Rachel and I made hot chocolate this evening and bundled up to go out and look at the stars. We drove up to Pete's Hill, had a bit of an adventure trying to find the trail and the bench, and then sat, sipping cocoa in the cool air, looking up at the sky above us, and talking about all things "philosophical."
Rachel and I went to high school together, so we've known each other for almost eight years now. There was a moment after our senior year of high school, early that summer, that a similar night like this passed. We were out at her place having a bonfire, an assortment of different friends laughing and being loud and throwing unused furniture into the fire (don't ask), and she, myself, and my cousin Daniel, wandered away from all the noise out into one of the empty fields near her house, one that my uncle works. It was chilly, but not cold, and we all sat down in the middle of the field, avoiding the parts of mud and the pokey grass - we turned our faces to the sky.
Our friend Kevin once said, "I swear, the sky really is bigger here. Everyone else says differently, but it really is." Our Montana sky is enormous; a wide expansive opening of everything that I really do swear is larger here. We sat that night and stared at it, and the stars were brilliant, covering the entire night sky like a thick blanket. We talked about who must have seen these generations before, who must have written the stories of where the constellations come from. It was beautiful, and it was quiet.
Thinking about it now, stars bookmark so many places in my memory. Laying out in the middle of a quiet highway, the dotted yellow line beneath me. A night in Coeur d'Alene that changed my life. A moment in the Pyrenees, surrounded by the same prayer being voiced in so many different tongues. They're always watching, always witnessing.
They're always telling us stories.
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