my only cool memory from childhood

Starlight

Shaking, someone is shaking me. It was early in the wee hours of the morning, and someone was shaking me out of a deep dreamless sleep. I cracked the thin film of tired that covered my eyelids, and sat up, only to realize the sun was far from rising, and the stars still twinkled solemnly from my window. I collapsed back down on my pillow, but my mother wrapped my small body in all the quilts and blankets one my bed. In my ear she whispered “You don’t want to miss the show hon.” and I smiled, just because I knew she would protect me. I peeked out from my cocoon of blankets only to feel icicles of frigid air strike my face, and to see the stars, standing like sentinels, lining the sky in a menagerie of milky wonder. My father waited for us with another huge blanket, lain out on the stiff concrete, my brother a wad of sheets in his lap. As we sat down, I glimpsed something, a streak of star across the barren midnight blue of the night sky. Then, another streak of light flew across the sky, and then another, and then another, until the entire sky was covered in meteors making their fiery path to earth. So many, I thought. So many stars and so few wishes to make. And yet, all these years later, I can only remember one. My last wish, as the last star left its path across a moonless sky was that I would always remember the falling star. As my mother carried me back to bed, I was already falling back to sleep, falling back in dreams of imaginary things. Now, it all feels like a dream. Something that never really happened, something that is hidden in the deepest recesses of my waking daydreams. Yet every once in a while, it comes back, creeps into my thought, as though it had always been there. Now, I write it down, so that I will never forget the night when I saw the starlight.