Palm fronds in my eyes
My partner is Deafblind, and I’ve been thinking about seeing lately. The stars stuck in the dark net of sky and palm fronds over the little black sand beach that forever feels like home to me. When my father held me up once or twice, giving me a temporary reprieve from bedtime out by the waves, they looked like something I’d always believe in but could not name. So sharp and clear. They’ve never looked quite the same since. Most nights, I look out the window at whatever tiny slice of sky is visible, and I wonder where the stars have gone now that they can hide behind yellow city streetlights and left-on construction lights and the red neon sign down by the corner and (of course) my very own yellow-shaded lamp in my little room.
They have disappeared, and I can’t see them anymore at night, and so a part of me is gone too. I don’t know why I should think of the stars in particular as shining talismans of grief. I have the way the sand felt between my toes. There are not many black sand beaches in the world. The smell of papaya leaf tea, which is taken for malaria and very bitter. Even the delicious smell of afternoon mist , cool and rising in the mountains near W-. We would go there sometimes when I was four or five. I remember the Olympic-sized swimming pool empty, growing mold and puddles over cracked tiles the color of the lightest washed blue sky. I remember Marie biscuits and hot tea with milk and He-man cartoons. The feeling of being cool after the lowland heat. Cold air can be a blanket in the tropics, the comfort you’re looking for, the hum of the air conditioning whispers a private paradise free of sweat and crowds and noise. And in the mountains, sitting by the abandoned swimming pool, it was as if all of God’s air was air conditioned, fragrant with the smells of the forest. The sound of cicadas as loud as normal conversation at night.
But I am talking about the stars, and about seeing. I remember them in canoes, too. The whole ocean buoyant beneath our little rocking boat. My father living out a fantasy of teaching his boys to fish but handicapped by indigenous fishing gear, which he didn’t really understand. There’s no fishing rod, because everywhere is deep. Just a small Y-yoke of wood for binding the clear line, and hermit crabs for bait. The darkness. The twinkling lights of the village far back against the horizon. Descending with the line. Countless fathoms. Desperately hoping a nameless thing would not bite the line. Hoping at the same time that I might catch a fish so my father would feel he’d done the right thing by us boys. Such is boyhood. Trying to play ball with your dad like he wants to, trying not to hit your whiffle ball into the swamp.
And every night the stars. The stars the steady thing on a fishing trip when the world is aswim and you can feel what lies beneath, the breath of the deep coming through great closed Leviathan teeth as the night grew older and the stars wheeled overhead forever. I remember a few different times my father took me out at night to see the stars. How he did not know the names of the southern constellations, so our evening was stars and surf and Dad just pointing out Orion’s belt after a laborious search, his bony index finger wavering beyond, low against the northern sky. That sky, north against the heartbeat of the surf, where a very slight lightness indicated a small human atoll in that vastness—the island of B-, a coral atoll in the vastness of the Pacific where we landed on an old bomber strip before or after slow flights to or from impossibly distant America.
It might as well have been the stars where I grew up. It was as far away.
Here in America, this past autumn my partner came out to see the stars with me. We went out at night beyond the city, and we had no expectations, because her eyes do change with time and maybe her time of stars was done. But it isn’t, not yet. I held her still and showed her where to look and her eyes did the rest. When I looked I felt palm fronds blowing, but the northern stars are strange to me, and I keep finding Orion’s belt. The stars are not as bright now as I remember, and I wonder if my eyes are changing too.
It makes me want to go outside tonight, just to make sure.
