I press my forehead and nose on the window. It's cold even though it's in the dead of summer on Cape Cod. My mother and I are driving back to our cottage in Orleans from Provincetown, and the map of constellations is unfolding in the Milky Way before my very eyes.
An old '70s song blurts out of the radio as a vague mixture of static and a repetitive chorus. I hum the tune. It's "Angie," by the Rolling Stones. When I look back up at the stars, meeting the sand dunes in a clash at the horizon line, I realize how much more the stars have shown up in those few minutes I spent wasted, staring inside the car that I can look at any time I please.
But then, for one moment there, it's just perfect. My heart beats a little faster, and the song echoes again and again in my head. If only this could have gone on for ever, with the stars so abundant like that! But, alas, everything gets corrupted, and that millisecond, my friend, was God.
