Today’s horoscope said to look for starry nights, but it’s been cloudy for two weeks, here, this far up north. Farther north than I ever anticipated ending up one day, really, but here I am anyway; when I was charting out the path a year ago, with not a clue which road to follow, maybe some childlike part of my brain figured the higher up the globe we went, the closer we would be to the celestial heavens, and how could I resist a poem like that? Turns out the stars here are just as far away as they were when I was in Iowa, and Illinois, and Florida, and New York.

Regardless, as much as I would love to see the stars right now, for whatever divine purpose of my horoscope, I’ve been thankful for the clouds. Even if the lack of sunshine washes the trees of their autumnal colors, it was a bitter drought of a summer. I’ve never wished for rain as fiercely as I did in early August, like if a bright enough bolt of lightning cracked open the sky all the answers would tumble out, because surely they must be up there, like an overstuffed attic, just waiting for the day the floor gives way beneath them. And what weighs more than an answer? Whether it’s the one you want to hear, or the one you wish would’ve stayed stuck up in that attic, with the boxes and the dust.

But that, funnily enough, was also in the horoscope today: “Truth will always complicate what you know. Don’t let this dissuade you from uncovering it.” 

There are truths it feels wrong to hope for. Or not wrong– God, how could it be wrong?– but tricky, maybe, and isn’t that fitting, this close to Halloween? It’d be a beautiful truth, if it came true, vivid and alive and frightening, but you have to choose your words oh-so-carefully as you try to coax it forward, otherwise you’ll scare it off. Or maybe the truth is scared of scaring you. Or maybe the truth doesn’t give a damn, because it just doesn’t think you have anything to offer.

The childlike part of my brain stamps its foot in the mirror. Isn’t the poetry enough? 

I feel young, here, which feels contradictory because I think the people here consider me old. Like I should know better, but I want to tell them: I haven’t seen that much of the sun, not just these past weeks but these past years, stuck inside as we were. And if I haven’t seen it, how am I supposed to have felt it turning enough to age me? There was that year where my mom and dad and I would emerge from our house only once the red of the sunset had bled out into the dirt horizon. We would gather around the fire pit; we would sprawl out on the driveway; we would crane our heads back as far as they could go and watch for satellites. Spring, summer, fall, winter. The sky was only ever inky indigo, the way lips turn blue once the blood has seeped away. 

No wonder I arrived here so pale. No wonder the sun of this summer was so scorching. 

The truth: I already know the truth. It’s simply waiting for the clouds to pirouette back into the wings, so the constellation– the story, stuff of myths– can drop from the rafters, dangling by its heartstring rope. It’s beautiful choreography, but stars don’t have to be predestined, no matter what the horoscope says. We can make new constellations whenever we wish. What are the heavens, if not something to rearrange? What is the attic if not a lovely place to spend the afternoon, hiding from the sun?