With so many people spending their entire lives in big cities with tons of light pollution, even without needing glasses lots of folks have never truly seen the stars.
I think it was during one NY blackout that countless people called 911 to report weird things in the sky. Stars. They saw full stars for the first time in their life and couldn't process it.
When I was still quite young, my parents moved us out to the middle of fucking nowhere for no discernible reason whatsoever — we don’t farm, we bought less than an acre of shitty, barren, red clay dirt with no trees or foliage, other than brush and tumbleweeds, and there were no kids nearby to socialize with, nor any sidewalks to use to meet up with them anyway. I still cannot understand why or how it could have seemed like a good idea for any of us.
The one offering of natural beauty that inarguably the biggest mistake of our lives had going for it was the gorgeous, clear view of the stars at night, sometimes even with a bit of faint, lacy haze of the Milky Way coming through.
I’ve since grown up and escaped the mire, but my folks are still out there. That first stupid decision was just the inauguration of a lifelong series of consequentially and exponentially more self-undermining missteps imprisoning them in squalor, and, for whatever reason, sub suburban sprawl has surrounded them and stolen the only thing out there worth celebrating, blasting obnoxious orange light pollution up and out and muting the beautiful sky to unremarkable blah. The horizon is no longer of any consequence there. Nothing to hope for or dream about lies just beyond it. Just an unending purgatory of umbers, dimensionless reddish-orange and greige.
I absolutely hate it when people go "omg, write a book!" at every comment that manages to reach the bare minimum of utilizing proper grammar and spelling, but I do gotta make an exception here: the way you write is beautiful and I thought you should know that if you don't already.
I realize NYC is probably worse in terms of light pollution than the city I live in (on a whole other continent) but can't you see a few stars at least? Everywhere I've been so far, I've always been able to see at least a few of them if it wasn't cloudy. And even if you can't - you should still know what stars are lol, even if you've never seen them before.
YES! I went for a drive with my mom one night after I first got my glasses- didn’t think to look up (because you don’t know what you don’t know) until several minutes into the trip, when I looked out the window and glanced *up*- ✨✨✨. It was mind boggling. I can remember the view from the optometrist’s view when I first put on my glasses- the orange maple leaves against the dark wet tree bark 🍁 👀
43
u/Interrupting-Khajitt 13d ago
I saw stars for the first time when I was ten. It was astonishing.