The orchestral clamor of pots and pans echoes into the living room. Seven girls, three guests, and four burners—a recipe for chaos. The floor creaks as I adjust my posture, bent over the oak coffee table that was selected for a more secluded dining experience. We jabber on between mouthfuls of salmon and salad, recapping Thursday, the end of a college week. 

A buzz interrupts the esoteric examinations of femininity and our woes. 

The Northern Lights. In Providence.

We jump up, yelling behind us, as the message passes throughout the house. The thunderous echoes of footsteps ascend to upper floors, interrupting those slumbering and studying. We burst outside, where she awaits, our eyes to the heavens. Through the collage of branches and leaves, the sky gleams with pink and purple strobes of light against a backdrop of dark blue. We bound towards a clearing, standing in the intersection of the street, oblivious to our vulnerability to worlds of concrete and cars. Others have done the same, voices echo into the indigo above as they take in the splendor of the night’s sky.

Can you believe people fly to Iceland to see this, and we just walked outside?

The breathtaking glowing bath of rosy light sprays across the sky is impinged upon by the artificiality of bulbs, diminishing its magnificence current by current. Each night, they blanket the brilliance of the stars, but today they veil something far more foreign. I can’t help but think of baby turtles, who know these lights to be no different from our moon. Thinking the cool embrace of briny ocean water awaits as they traipse across the white painted lines of an asphalt roadway. Too late to realize they were mistaken.

The urge to escape the icy glow of the streetlights overcomes us. We sprint back into the house and grab jackets. Huddled in the trunk of the car, gazing out of the dark tinted windows in the hopes of a glimpse of the sky. Racing towards the river, hoping to catch the dying embers of the apparent geomagnetic storm that gave us a glimpse of another reality. 

Escaping light is hard. Uncovering natural light is even harder. Refuges of suburbia, patches of green in milieus of fluorescence. A baseball field. Left peaceful only for diversion, its grass and cleared canopy a departure from society’s cloistered existence. With the lights off, the field provides a different reality from its typically blinding nature. We sit in the darkness. Nothing to hear but the crickets and the clink of ceramic dishware that joined in our odyssey. Comfortable silence, each of us in our own internal dialogue with the night sky. 

The pink hue dances slowly across the cosmos, drawing brushstrokes of brightness over midnight blue. Bursts of green and maroon appear, bruising the strobes of rouge. Stars peek out from underneath the veils of color, glimmering gently. The cool air makes them feel brighter somehow, pinching at our cheeks and widening our eyes.

We had to drive to find this, an oasis of darkness, a microcosm of wilderness free from the shackles of industry. The harsh glares of artificial iridescence too distant to envelop the darkness in its cold iron grasp. 

The aurora holds a peaceful gaze. The crashes of kitchenware and moans of social and intellectual despair feel like a foreign land. Warm strums of a ukulele float through the air, emanating from the speaker. Gentle echoes of the chorus reverberate through my ears, coalescing in the sensory elixir of cold air and vibrant lights. 

I don't see what anyone can see

In anyone else but you.

Words interrupt the melodious voices. 

I realize I don’t look up enough.

It was true. Days of ruminating on the quotidian woes of college, I look down. Maybe straight ahead, standing tall if I’m feeling bold. Maybe it makes me feel like I am above or equal to it all. As if individual existence is consequential. 

When I was young, I wanted to be tall. I wanted to reach the peaks of mountains and survey the world below me, to feel as though I had control over the dollhouses of society that lay below. To be grown up, to exist, meant seeing things with perspective, of distance and maturity. 

Looking up, I feel small. Stars we see tonight could be long gone, their light still radiating to our tiny planet, making memories and magnificence as ghosts of the past. It’s a beautiful thing to feel so small, so insignificant, a mere speck of dust on the clock of geologic time. The stars gleam, the cosmos swirls indefinitely, and some nights they glow with colors we can only dream of, an ephemeral reminder of our infinitesimal place in this world.