Day 54

I look at the moon, a thin luminous crescent in the darkening sky. Through the window of the study, I watch it stand still in the dark blue sky. Below, trees have lost their colours against a background of waning sunset flames.

I think of the 6th of May when I last looked at the moon properly. It had filled the eastern skies then, my feet firmly planted on the other side of our house, by the front door. Magnified and bright I could see some of its craters in astonishing details.

The details are non existent today. It is a thin line in the sky but it is here.

My partner calls from the bedroom.

‘I’m looking at the moon,’ I answer.

It is reassuring to watch it there, in the sky by my house. It is there as it has always been, as it will always be. The stars too are there even if I can only see a handful of them. Images of the cosmos float in my mind. Burst of colours and specks of light, orange glows, and deep deep darks, colourful planets full of gas and movements, and us here on Earth. I cannot comprehend the science behind the stars. The numbers are too great, the theories too wild, the images too unreal. I avidly read articles about new discoveries in the New Scientist only understanding half of what is being said but it doesn’t matter. The stars, the moon here tonight, are filled with magic I’m happy to leave unexplained. There are Cassiopea and Orion whose mythology I understand, Georges Méliés and Hergé whote stories that I devour. And there is me, standing in a house, in the suburbs of Bristol, trapped in space, looking at the moon. It is the same moon I have observed so many times during walks and cycles, the one that accompanies early and late commute journeys in winter time, the one that silently, continually floats around us.