Sunday, March 12, 10:30 PM. Garrett.

I had a pretty good birthday the other day. Mom got me a guitar I’ve always wanted, a PRS McCarty 594. It would have cost like a million dollars before. It looks awesome and feels really good and it’s like it plays itself.

Dad got me a telescope, which is also awesome, and tonight we all went out and looked at the sky. We saw Saturn with its rings. We saw Jupiter. We looked at the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda galaxy. They weren’t as colorful as in the pictures but still kind of neat to look at.

Then the moon came up. That was the best of all.

When you look with your eyes it’s just a big white disk with maybe some blotches on it. But when you look close you see it has all this detail you never realized: thousands of craters and mountains casting deep shadows, and white explosion marks where rocks have hit it. You realize it’s not just an emoji or a face, but a globe, a planet just hanging there above us. I’ve always thought of it like a big lamp in the sky, but it’s not a lamp, it’s a reflector. All its light comes from the sun. If there wasn’t a sun, there wouldn’t be a moon. Not really. It would only be a giant shadow drifting across the stars.

It was kind of scary to look at so close. I felt like it could reach down and pull me, tug me off the earth and up into its gravity. Or it could fall down slow, faster, faster, and squash us like ants on a bowling ball. Then I thought, what’s worst of all, is if it just disappeared, and from then on at night there was nothing but the stars, cold and far away.