I was nine years old when I discovered the Orion Nebula. The conditions were ripe for astronomical observation -- the night, ridiculously cold, so cold that even the air was frozen. The cold was a very important factor. Summer nights in Georgia were too stagnant for stargazing, so humid you feel like you’re staring at the sky through pond water. But in the winter, skies were so clear you felt like at any minute you would float right into space.

The night in question had been painfully uneventful. Matthew was at a sleepover with his friends, so I couldn’t turn to him for entertainment. I’d exhausted any enjoyment I could get from playing pretend with my stuffed animals. I’d lost my gameboy charger and the device itself was dead. Mom and Dad were adults and tended to fall asleep at 10:00 pm sharp regardless of their locations. And beyond them, there was no one else. There never was anyone else. Just me. 

I knew that Dad kept the binoculars on the very top shelf of the coat closet, far in the back behind heaps of scarves and hats. I was forced to drag over one of the dining room chairs, stand tip-toe at the very edge, and fumble blindly until my fingers found the leather strap of their container. At this point, my actions had alerted Dixie, and she pattered over, paws click-clack-click-clack-ing against the hardwood floors. I shushed her pointedly -- couldn’t she tell that I was on an important mission? -- but a moment’s worth of listening yielded sounds of soft snores over the low tones of Food Network television. It was after 10:00, and as predicted Mom sleeping soundly in front of the TV. Around me, the house settled, wall beams and floorboards creaking with small whines. It was too quiet. It was too empty. And I kept replaying the conversation I’d heard that morning over and over again in my head 

“Joe, are you sure you want to do this?”

“With the mortgage and the new car we can’t afford for me to quit. And I’ll just be gone for the weeks, back from the weekends.” 

“How are we going to tell the kids?”

“I don’t know, Mary Louise. I don’t.” 

Dad’s office was in the basement, shrouded in cobwebs and childhood pictures of Matthew and I. From the top of the basement stairs, the journey seemed especially harrowing, but with a deep breath I braved the dark, running past the storage room (in which I knew without a doubt some kind of evil boogeyman resided) and stopping before his office. Our big green suitcase, dusty with age, sat by the doorway, challenging me, reminding me. I suddenly became aware that my palms were clammy. With a shiver, I wiped my hands off on my jeans and poked my head through the ajar door. 

“Dad. I want to go look outside.” 

My Dad has looked the same since the day I was born -- salt and pepper hair, scruffy beard and mustache, and a plethora of sweatshirts, blue-jeans, and white tennis-shoes. He look at me over the tops of his dorky glasses.

“It’s freezing out,” he responded. It wasn’t a rejection, nor a dismissal. Simply a counter, a ‘did you consider this’? That was what I loved about Dad; he talked to me like I wasn’t a kid, like I wasn’t the baby of the family. Like I was a person. 

“That’s when the sky is clearest,” I pointed out, hand on hip and lower lip jutting out in a symbol of stubborn perseverance.  He blinked, thinking, and sat back with a creak in his desk chair. In my haste I added: 

“Plus, we own coats.” 

That got me a bemused snort, which I knew was a surrender. Smartassery, at this age, was my specialty, and I was bounding up the stairs before he was even out of his chair. 

It was a moonless night, and as I closed the back door behind me the darkness seemed all the more impenetrable. The forest stood in shrouded stillness, a mass of dark branches and unexplored terrain. I shivered; it was all too easy to imagine what could be hiding behind tree-trunks, watching me, waiting to snatch me up, or Mom, or Dad. Dixie panted by my side with a dopey grin. She seemed okay, and that alone comforted me enough to start moving.

I walked down the driveway, listening to the far away noises of night. In the still, sounds travelled farther, deeper. Owls questioned through the woods. Every once in awhile, a coyote would howl and Dixie would stiffen, nose pointed towards the miles-away source. I stopped once I was in the very center of the street, feet planted firmly, head craned back at an unhealthy angle. Eyes wide to take in as much light as possible. 

I stared at the sky through the lenses of my own childhood fantasy. Without the moon, without any wisp of cloud or glow of street light, and without the thickness of air, the sky seemed to me more star than not. Splayed across the sky, the Milky Way pressed down upon the atmosphere, a thick band of light from an unfathomable number of stars. Billions of pinpricks of lights, scattered across black velvet, winking down at me -- just me. It was always just me. 

It should be noted that I had always been a rather imaginative child. I had an arsenal of imaginary friends and plenty of adventures to go on. Loneliness was not a concept with which I had any relationship. But then, standing in the middle of the street, in the dead of winter, with an entire universe perched just above my head, I felt unquestionably small.  

How far away is Ohio? At that moment, it felt like Dad might as well go to another planet every week; away is still away. Leaving is still leaving. The realization hit me hard, and I felt my breath shudder when I inhaled the freezing winter air. 

“Golden Mermaid?” 

Dad’s voice made me jump -- I hadn’t heard the crunch of his footsteps against the asphalt -- and I turned at whip speed. The air on my cheeks made the presence of tears feel even more unpleasant, more unnatural. 

Dad looked at me, his face lit just by the faint glow of our porch light. I knew that he knew that I was crying, but he didn’t let on. Just looked at me, standing still like I was in the middle of the galaxy. Then he turned away from me, craned his neck like I had, and scanned the sky.

“Anything interesting on the binoculars?” 

I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I was holding and, in a way I hoped was subtle, scrubbed at the sticky remnants of tears.

“Haven’t looked yet.”

“If you were going to take them without asking, you might as well get a good use out of them.” 

But I could hear his smile, so I pressed the cold metal of the eyecups against my eye sockets. I’d just looked skyward when Dad spoke again. 

“Mom told me you found out about Ohio.” 

I pressed the binoculars harder into my eyes, so hard that black spots swarmed my vision, making the sky look alive; making a point to stand still although I felt like someone had grabbed my stomach and twisted it hard. I’d heard them talking about it the day before, in hushed voices they must have thought wouldn’t echo to the second floor. Dad’s job wanted him to move to Ohio, to work there during the week. So that’s what he was going to do. Leave, with no discernable return date that I knew of. 

“Okay.” 

I couldn’t muster more than that, but Dad kept talking.

“You know I’m not leaving because I want to. It’s for work.” 

“Okay.” 

“You won’t even know I’m gone! And I’m coming back every weekend so --”

“Except you won’t be home during the week so I’m pretty sure I’ll notice.” 

My eyes were shut tightly against the lenses to trap any threat of tears, but my voice, thick with protest and anger, gave me away. When I opened my eyes, the stars were blurry and faint. Like I was looking at them through pond water. 

“Nothing’s going to change.” His voice was sure, even. “No matter how far away we are from each other, we are still a family.” 

I swallowed his words, processed them. My skin felt hot, and the places where it was exposed to the winter air itched.  I knew they were true. I knew that we were a family, and that things were going to be okay. I knew because Dad knew, and for now that had to be enough. Blinking rapidly, I scanned the sky slowly before responding.

“Good.” 

Dad sighed, a happy sigh, a relieved sigh, and began to speak again: 

“And if you really miss me, you can call whenever --”
“I found something!”

I cut him off in earnest as I twisted the focus knob. My voice was clear. The sky was clear too. 

“What?” 

It was a star. . . but it wasn’t a star. I knew stars, well and thoroughly. I knew what they looked like on summer nights and on winter nights, through telescopes and binoculars, and through my own eyes. A cluster of bright the same intensity of star, but fuzzy on the edges, and bigger than a star too! 

“Let me see!” Dad took the binoculars and crouched down so we were at the same height. 

“It looks like a big smudged star, but brighter!” I pointed up, aligning my fingertip with the anomaly. “It’s in Orion. Dad, I think it’s a nebula?” 

“I’m not sure, Golden Mermaid, it might just be a star or. . .wow.” 

“I know!” 

At this point, my breath was coming out in excited puffs and it felt like a hundred tiny needles were pricking my fingers. Dad and I sat there in the middle of the cul de sac until half past midnight, passing the binoculars back and forth to admire our new found fascination. 

“Do you think you can see our nebula in Ohio?” 

The question came as we were trekking back up the driveway, following the slow pendulum movement of Dixie’s tail. Dad thought a moment, pondering the question with a seriousness that delighted me. 

“I’m almost certain of it.” 

Once we were inside away from the cold, Dad pulled up the Wikipedia page for what was the Orion Nebula. I was nodding off next to him when he pointed to an image of a skychart. 

“You know, Golden Mermaid, I’ll be able to see all the same stars in Ohio that we see in Georgia.” 

“Cool,” I mumbled back. 

Eight years later, intoxicated on college acceptances and the bigness of the world ahead of me, I would sit at the window with a sewing needle in one hand, brown india ink dripping from its tip as I poked the ink into the skin on my ankle until it left seven permanent dots tattooed on my leg. The arrangement was so familiar, the same pinpricks of light I’d spent years staring at. The constellation that, at 1,344 light years away, felt like some semblance of home. The stick and poked tattoo remains on my leg today, as much a part of me as my family. 

On the night we discovered the Orion nebula, when I finally stumbled into bed, I ruminated on what Dad had said . No matter what, we were under the same stars. In the hugeness of the universe, we had the same view. I fell asleep feeling small in a way that was good and safe and not alone, listening to the echoes of owl’s hoots and thinking about our nebula that hung in the sky.