There is a light in the sky. It is simply a dot, though it is easily the most prominent glimmer in the night. If I stare, the light seems to almost flicker, the glow too luminous for my eyes. I don’t see it every night, but it is visible often enough, and it is simply too bright to be a star and too stationary to be a satellite. Unfortunately, nobody else seems to know about this shimmering dot, though I’ve mostly remembered to point it out on cloudy nights.
Now I have made a few halfhearted attempts to figure out the source for myself. I downloaded a ludicrous app and held my phone aloft, which was supposed to pinpoint the celestial object in the distance with my screen, but it simply showed me, instead, a haphazard collection of constellations and a pointillist display of stars that couldn’t be differentiated. And that left me only a bit better than a caveman staring with unanswered questions into the darkness—I didn’t exactly invent stories about distant, blinking gods, but I didn’t know how to explain the light.
In my neighborhood, there’s a settling on most evenings, a hush that descends, as apartment lights are flicked on and the general daytime hum begins to slow. I still hear the occasional firetruck and passing car and solitary dog, but there’s little to interrupt my silent view of this lonely light in the sky—its sparkle too brilliant to ignore. In some ways it reminds me of Karl Ove Knausgård’s curious 2020 novel, The Morning Star, which manages to combine the mystical with the real, when the sudden emergence of a bright light in the sky doesn’t seem to change much at all—people must still work and argue and deal with bills and find a way to meet lovers and handle tedious bosses and face difficult confrontations—despite the unexplained and striking change in the sky.
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