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Rowen never wanted to live in a world without stars. Not only were they his element, they were very literally his guiding beacons. They were like tiny pieces of his soul, thrown up into the heavens. He was lost without his connection to them.
Its why he hated living in the city.
There are no stars in the city.
He missed the little house-like cabin in the woods. There’d been no street lights there, nothing to blot out the night sky and keep the stars from sparkling. At the time, he’d hated the remoteness of it, the chill in the winter that permeated his bones and refused to leave, and the fact that he couldn’t get so much as a pizza delivered.
The stars had been amazing though. It’d been so dark that he could see every one of them, streaking through the darkness, twinkling and sparkling like the cheesiest metaphor of diamonds on velvet.
Here in the city though...there were only airplanes that sparkled in the orangey-blue glow, the unnatural light that made the sky look like a dying ember-like it had been on fire and was now slowly snuffing itself out. He hated it, it made him think the world was ending, which was against his very nature.
And his missing stars.
The other day he’d been down at the gas station buying a slurpee, and he’d heard some kid ask his mom if an airplane was a shooting star, pointing up to the pulsing light.
It sickened him.
It was damn depressing, really, that a kid could even mistake an airplane for stars. Did kids even take their kids to the planetarium anymore? He knew that buying them a telescope and taking them to the backyard was out of the question, but at least take them to a science center, a space museum, something. The space race was long gone, long forgotten to history, but it shouldn’t be. Space was their future, as a culture, as a species, but how could they capture it if kids were making wishes on airplanes?
It broke his heart.
Rowen was smart, brilliant even, with all the degrees and accolades necessary to prove it. He’d studied at all the best universities, completed all the best programs, been head hunted by every Aeronautics program in the world, not that he’d ever taken a position with any of them.
As Sage had once pointed out, Rowen would never make the space race real again, no matter how brilliant and persuasive, countries simply would not shell out to explore space anymore.
They simply were not interested. The new world order grew up wishing on airplanes, and unless space came ready made to inhabit, they simply were not interested.
He’d taken his slurpee home, not that he was all that interested in it anymore, climbed the stairs and onto the roof, and stared up at that hateful sky hiding his stars, and the airplanes that kids were wishing on instead.
He’d never wanted to live in a world without stars.
.fin.