Stars Like Shattered Diamonds

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. That is, if somehow you managed to step out into the dark nothing of outer space and compel your vocal cords to produce a scream, that scream would be instantly extinguished. Without matter to carry the vibrations of your voice, the sound would go nowhere, leaving even less of a trace than that little moribund redness that lingers on a candle after you have blown it out. In short, the void is deaf.

But increasingly, it seemed to me that the opposite was also true. That in a place crowded to overflowing with matter – an anti-void, if you will – your scream would also be stifled, choked to death by sheer quantity of objects that surrounded it.

And frustratingly, the creation of antivoids seemed to be the recurring side effect of the forward progress of human civilization. I considered the entirety of the city around me to be such a byproduct. In this endless visual and auditory cacophony, no one could hear me scream, no one could witness me struggle. I could walk to the top of my apartment building and threaten to jump, and I would barely cause a single head to lift its eyes to the invisible sky. Everyone – myself included – had blinded themselves to the sight of beggars, had deafened themselves to the sounds of ambulances.

But I could remember a time when this wasn’t my reality. Not so long ago, my home had been a one-story house nestled on a six-acre lot, miles away from anything that even resembled a town. The loudest things I heard at night were crickets and frogs, not vehicles and gunshots.

Sometimes, on winter nights when our parents would go to bed early, my little brother Elijah I would bundle up in our warmest clothes and quietly step out of the house. A part of me knew that this might be dangerous – there could be cayotes or bears or worse – and that as Elijah’s older sister it was my responsibility to protect him, but neither of us could resist the allure of these serene nights.

Arms wrapped around our chests for warmth, we’d carefully tread over dry leaves, watching the clouds of our breath take form and then quickly disappear like ghosts into the darkness. Our route wasn’t long, and we would soon find ourselves at the top of our favorite hill, where we would then sit down and turn our eyes heavenward. Above us, stars like shattered diamonds spread across a virgin sky. Ever reliable, the old familiar constellations would greet us with the same cosmic dance they had performed for thousands of years.

We would spend most of this time in silence, but it was not uncommon for Elijah to let his voice softly rise. “I want to go to the stars someday, Nora.”

“I’m sure you will,” I would always say.

“Do you mean it?”

“I promise, Elijah. I promise you will get to soar among the stars.”

Elijah found books on astronomy and space travel, and with my encouragement and assistance, he eagerly soaked up their information. He had posters of nebulae on his bedroom wall and was thrilled when he received a NASA t-shirt for his eighth birthday. My little brother was going to be an astronaut. Perhaps he would join the moon colony, or maybe he would be one of the lucky few to journey to Mars. So much potential and so much excitement, and I was wrapped up in it.

But these stargazing days would come to an end. There was a final night that Elijah and I spent under the stars. But neither of us knew that night would be the last. I wish I had. I wish I had savored that time, had tried to soak up and memorize every detail to carry with me forever. But I didn’t. I treated it just like any other night, assuming there would be a countless supply of future opportunities.

I had no way of knowing that Elijah had only a month left to live.

After he was gone, I couldn’t, for a long time, to bring myself to go back to the hill and reconvene with the stars. I knew that they hadn’t changed. I knew that they had witnessed tragedy upon tragedy unfold upon the dust of the earth, and Elijah’s death would make them no less steadfast. But I was afraid of what I might feel, of the way it might open the gaping hole in my heart even deeper.

I finally found the courage to return on the night before I left for Dallas. It had been years since I had ventured out to the hill at night, but my feet guided themselves, retracing now eroded footsteps from nights long past.

As I approached, I found myself closing my eyes, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I wanted to save the view for the moment it would be most spectacular, or if it was because part of me still never wanted to see the stars like this again. I paused for a moment after I reached the top, trying to slow my breathing. My eyes crept open, and the familiar sights displayed themselves to me, marred only by the welling in my eyes.

I fell to my knees. For years, the stars had been to me a source of peace, but in this moment, I couldn’t have been any further from peace.

“Why?” I managed to breathe through my quivering jaw. “Why, God, why?”

It wasn’t supposed to be me. It wasn’t supposed to be me going to the Space Academy, studying to be an astronaut, preparing to one day leave this atmosphere. It was supposed to be Elijah. But I had to do what I had to do. I had promised my brother that he would travel the stars, and that promise had failed. I only found solace in the thought that the part of him that lived on in me might one day fulfill his dream, that he could see it all through my eyes.

I cried for a long time that night, but the stars above me remained as impassive as ever.