Under a neon glow in a motel parking lot, I’m a cliché of a waiting someone inside of her rental car, watching ice on the windshield become water on the hood. It’s late enough to be early, it’s cold enough to wear everything I’ve brought. Soon the fluorescence fades behind me and speed limits become blurs. At an intersection of one, I look up and something in my chest leaps to my throat. My body shrinks itself or I shrink into my body, folding into a shape carved by the force I feel through glass and metal. The stars. I step into silence so full that my ears ring, my breaths echo, even my motions, slight as they are, wax profane as they cut through stillness. An eagerness to gaze without the glass filter swells. The stars. But I don’t dare. Not yet. Because, I reason, finally looking means facing expectation—of seeing less than I hoped or more than I imagined—and from that comes a fear of giving in to the overwhelming largeness of my smallness, of the space between me and my self that I have worked so hard to nurture. Instead I watch what the dark has let me have of the ground, transfer my weight until it doesn’t feel like mine. And when my hands have warmed inside my pockets and the quiet brings to mind a voice I used to know, I close my eyes and tilt my head back. It’s green and blue behind here, streaky and shimmery. Then I open them. Inhale sharply. Let tears escape. The fear, I notice, is gone. Hope and humility are in its place now, a sense of servitude to a universe I’ve been resisting. In between falling meteors, I find my long-lost wonder; against a prehistoric silhouette, I accept a fullness I’ve refused. Surrender my weapons, empty my hands, offer vulnerable miles of skin. I give in to the celestial assurance that, in this moment, I simply exist.