To the One Who Will Live Here After Me

To the one who will live here after me,

Have you ever looked closely at the upstairs ceiling, where the broad expanse slopes down towards the west? Have you ever noticed any inconsistency in its smooth, flat perfection—any quirk to its otherwise featureless character?

In all likelihood, there is no longer anything left to see. After so many years, the entire house is sure to have been scrubbed down and refinished its fair share of times. I live with the hope that popcorn ceilings will never come back into style, though; if you get a ladder, and lean up into the hollow between the far window and the peak of the roof, then skim your fingertips along the surface of the sheetrock, I am certain that you will be able to feel a few stubborn flecks of crust, the last remains of what was once adhesive. There is a good chance that you will have no interest in this ancient glue, even if you do find it. In that case, simply write it off as another eccentricity of this old place, like the uneven floorboards in the hallway or the countless pinholes that pock the wall where I used to hang my drawings. None of it will cause any harm; save your worries for the drooping beam that runs along the edge of the living room.

If you are still curious, though—if you have never liked the color of the ceiling and were planning on repainting it soon anyway—you could get a pen and draw a circle around each rough callous that you find. You will probably notice the way some of them arrange themselves into clusters; as you plot a course across the ceiling, maybe you will even recognize the shapes that humanity has charted for thousands of years: a cross with outstretched wings; a sideways hourglass, its middle studded by three distinct points; the welcoming outline of a drinking-ladle. As I write this, I glance up to trace their luminous contours—marked not by ink or clinging fragments of glue, but by the dozens of plastic stars that sprawl across the firmament of my bedroom.

             Will you understand, I wonder? In the years that separate us, how much will the world have changed? Have you known the awe of looking up and seeing the Milky Way splashed across the heavens? Do you know what it is like to long for that feeling?

At night, my ceiling glows with the artificial phosphorescence of constellations that I have never glimpsed in the real sky. The house is too near to the city; a perpetual twilight hangs overhead, a suffocating gloam of dull, brownish-purple that oozes its way through the crack in the curtains, lightening the walls even after every lamp has been extinguished. Some nights, I can see the moon through the window, gleaming weakly, like a tarnished coin dropped on leaden pavement, but the glare of streetlights and high-rises washes away the delicate light of the stars as surely as gold-dust being swept through a sluice. Instead, the sky glitters with the slowly-blinking strobes of airliners, like monstrous fireflies drifting through the murk of a swamp. After five thousand years of fighting to bring daylight into the darkness, mankind has become the victim of its own success.

The plastic stars were bought on a whim. I found them at a yard sale a few years ago: a zipper-bag containing hundreds of them, in all different sizes, for just twenty-five cents. I felt ridiculous as I handed the money over, and even more ridiculous a few hours later: standing on a chair in my bedroom, an astronomy book balanced in one hand as I pressed each pale-green star carefully into position on the ceiling. It was such a pointless, childish thing to do—a meager patch for the galaxy-sized hole in my heart. Yet, that night, as I lay in bed and stared up at the seven shimmering sisters of my false Pleiades, I felt strangely comforted. Like the gilt-edged images of saints in a holy shrine, my stars are a shallow imitation of the originals, but also a reminder of the wonders in which I can have faith.

Somewhere, through the sheetrock and roof shingles, and far beyond the low, gray ceiling of the metropolitan sky, the stars still look down, waiting for the day when they will once more be able to meet our gaze. There are others who care, like I do, who miss seeing the constellations strewn like scattered diamonds in the black velvet night; by the time I leave this place, maybe there will be enough of us to have made a difference. The artificial sun will finally be allowed to set, and the city will sleep once more. Until then, I will sleep beneath the dim glow of my plastic stars, like those ancient humans who once huddled near to their campfires and longed for the day to break.

Maybe you will find my stars when you come here, still clinging to the ceiling where I glued them so many years before. As much as I have loved them, though, I hope that they will be gone. When you want to see Cygnus, or Lyra, or Hercules, I hope that your wish will lead you out into the backyard that I loved so much. I hope that you will lie back upon the lush carpet of the wild violets planted by the person who lived here before either of us, and the woodland strawberries that were my own addition. I hope that you will hear the chirp of the treefrogs in the old beech, and the laughing of a distant coyote revel, and the rustling of the owls as they awaken for their nightly hunt. I hope that, as you gaze up past the pines, you will see the richness of a sky that I wish I could have known.

I hope that you will not need plastic stars.