Pedro could not sleep. This had been true for three weeks and he had run out of strategies — the warm milk, the no-screen hour, the counting that unravelled before it reached a hundred. At 1am he gave up and went outside, which was not something he had done before. He was fourteen and the street was quiet in the particular way of a residential neighbourhood at that hour, not silent but inhabited by sounds that didn't ask anything of him: a distant car, a cat, the ambient hum of the city doing whatever cities did when no one was watching.
He walked to the end of the road where there was a small hill and from the top of it you could see a long way — the lights of the bay, the dark water, and above it all the sky with more stars than were visible from his bedroom window, where the streetlamp made everything nearby bright and everything above invisible. He stood there and looked up and had the strange sensation of the sky being very large, which he knew already, but feeling it was different from knowing it.
He had been lonely that month. Not dramatically lonely — no catastrophe, no falling out — just the slow accretion of a feeling that he was slightly to the side of everything, watching rather than in it, unsure of how to step back in. He had not told anyone this because it seemed ungrateful, which is the shape loneliness takes when it wants to stay. Standing on the hill, looking at the stars, he felt the loneliness as a fact rather than a failure. It was just where he was. And above him, on the other side of all that darkness, were other people also looking at the sky, also where they were, some of them also to the side of things that month.
He went home and slept, finally, at 3am. He didn't know what had changed. Only that looking at something very large had made something smaller feel proportionate, and that the darkness he'd been avoiding in his bedroom was the same darkness that held the stars, and that you could be lonely and connected at the same time, and that both were real and neither cancelled the other.
He went back up the hill the following night, just to check. The stars were still there.
The same dark that hides what you fear holds everything you love. You are never alone in it.
