I still remember the night of the meteors, when we were fifteen.

It was a summer evening, and the mountain breeze had finally carried away the sweltering heat of the day. We climbed a steep trail up to an open plateau. Around us, the rolling silhouettes of the hills shut out the city lights and noise of the bay area entirely, tucking us away into another world.

I found a flat rock and sat down, leaning back with my hands resting on the grass, just lifting my eyes to the night sky — a sky so deep and awe-inspiring that it led my mind to habitually drift toward a singular thought: how the starlight meeting our eyes in this very moment might have journeyed across the dark for tens of thousands of years.

Confronted with such a colossal scale of time and space, my own existence shrank into near nothingness. And strangely, this insignificance brought me a profound sense of peace. Because out here, I didn't have to face the crowds, didn't have to second-guess what was in their hearts, didn't have to force myself into those clumsy expressions of emotion. All I had to do was be still.

But she was never one to stay still.

Instead of sitting down like me, she walked right to the very edge, where the view opened widest.

"Look! Over there!" She suddenly reached out in excitement, pointing to a distant fold in the skyline.

Following her gaze, I looked up, just in time to see the first meteor tracing a silent path across the night. Then came a second, and a third — brief sparks struck in the deep void, vanishing behind the distant ridges.

Watching those fleeting flashes of light, my first instinct was to bemoan that, in the vast expanse of cosmic history, this brief brilliance barely amounted to a flicker. But I swallowed the words before they could take shape.

I saw her — chin tilted up, hands pressed over her chest, the vastness above entirely captured in her eyes. She didn't close them to make a wish. She just watched, with a focus so fierce, so full of breathless wonder, as if trying to carve every last burning trail into her heart.

She said nothing, but I still knew what she would have said.

"But think about it — they drifted alone through absolute darkness and freezing cold for millions of years, just to burn their brightest in the singular second they fall. How could you just call that 'burning out'?"

Without realizing it, I found myself slipping into her way of seeing, looking at all that brilliance with new eyes.

In that moment, it struck me that perhaps the way I looked at the world had always been too heavy. I was always seeking refuge in the relics of the past and the long, slow currents of time, trying to measure everything with reason, hiding my true self for fear of getting hurt.

But she was different. She didn't care where this light had come from, nor that it would one day fade. She only cared about the brilliance of this exact moment, and she embraced it fiercely, with all her heart.

I kept my silence, leaving my thoughts unspoken. I stayed where I was.

But after that night, whenever I look up at the night sky, I no longer feel only the vastness of the universe and my own insignificance. Because I know that hidden in that distant light is the courage she taught me.

I might never become someone who embraces the world as openly and unreservedly as she does, but I am willing to be the deep, quiet night sky.

I am trying to change, too. To accept myself. To reach out to others. It hasn't been as hard as I once imagined.

Even when tomorrow, the rising sun forces us back into our separate orbits, at least in this moment, as long as this starry sky remains, the sanctuary in our hearts will never collapse.

Until the spring when we finally meet again.