The North Star

I hope to find the North Star one day. Maybe it’ll call out to me like a lightbulb calls out to a moth at night. I mean, it’s essentially just a big bright spot in the sky, right? How hard can it be to find one of those? Apparently, very. I’ve never completely wrapped my head around which of those billions and billions of spots is the North Star. I’ve been told by various people that it can be found at the tip of the Little Dipper. Unfortunately, I’ve never had any luck finding that, either. I’ve seen the Big Dipper plenty of times, but the smaller cousin that everyone raves about keeps escaping me somehow. People have also said that the North Star is the brightest star in the sky, but if you told me to point out the brightest of all those shiny specks out there, I’d bet you 50 bucks I wouldn’t notice any difference in brightness at all. No matter how many times people have tried pointing out Polaris, as it’s also called, or how many nights I’ve spent looking through a telescope in a desperate search to find it, I’ve never been truly convinced that I’ve seen it.

That’s what I would have said last year. Between then and now, I met someone. Someone whose smile made me stop and stare. Someone whose laughter always perked me up. Someone who would twiddle her thumbs and hum to herself while she took a test. Someone who made me feel like a kid when I was around her. She was a new student at my school when I met her. It was the very first day, and of all people, she asked me where the science classroom was. I walked her to class, and we introduced each other. We exchanged a few one-liners and decided to meet for lunch. We talked more and more, exchanging numbers afterward. After three months of getting to know each other, I asked if she wanted to hang out sometime. We walked through the park, had a picnic, and shared some of our innermost secrets. We hung out more and more and started to call our get-togethers “dates”. I asked if she wanted to go to the winter dance with me. She said yes, and we had a great time. She asked me to meet her parents. I later introduced her to mine. Six months after we first met, I was lucky enough to call her my girlfriend.

One night, we decided to stargaze. We met in a field just outside my house. I spread a picnic blanket on the grass and smoothed out the wrinkles. She and I laid flat on our backs, her head on my stomach. We talked and talked as we stared up at the sky and searched for constellations. She knew a lot about the night sky. She had stargazed basically all her life. She knew the best time to look for her favorite constellations, which “stars” were actually planets and even the names of individual stars. At one point, she pointed at a certain star and told me it was her favorite. Polaris. The North Star. Woah. There it was. The most famous star in the world. I could finally say that I had seen it for myself. Looking at it now, it was, indeed, slightly brighter than all the other stars around it. It was like it shone brighter just for us, right there, right then. She told me why she loved the star so much -- her interest in stargazing started simply because her mom told her about the star’s discovery when she was a kid and she was so intrigued that she started checking out books about astronomy at her local library. Her passion about it showed in every word she said. I told her I thought it was beautiful. I grasped her hand, and we lay there for so long I lost track of time.

A few weeks after that, she came up to me and said we needed to talk. She pulled me aside and told me she didn’t feel quite the same way she did when we first started going out. She reassured me it wasn’t anything I said or did, she just didn’t feel as strong of a connection, but she would still like to be friends. I was devastated. To be honest, I still am. What hurts the most is that I still see her every day. Walking to the bus, heading to my next class, taking math tests: it feels like she’s everywhere now, and I can’t help but think about what used to be and what could still be. Sure, I still talk to her and we’re still what you would call friends, but it’s not like it used to be. Now, I wish that night would never end. I wish I could have appreciated what we had and told her how much she meant to me more than I did. I wish I could stargaze with her one last time. But now, here I am, standing on my front deck, looking out into the purple-blue twilight, which is sprinkled with bright specks of light. I dart my eyes around, searching for a certain speck. I find it. A speck that’s slightly brighter than every other light around it. A speck that stands out to me now as the most beautiful of them all. Polaris. The North Star. It was because of her that I was able to find it. Now, finding it there, it’s like I find her all over again.

This story was inspired by a Google search, where I accidentally typed “hope to find” instead of “how to find” while looking up how to find the aperture I used for certain images on my camera. One of the results that showed up was “hope to find the north star.” That stuck with me as an opening line, so I used it.