Tonight I became stars. I walked out of the staff kitchen after midnight, and there they were, bright and numerous enough to make themselves known over the light of my Petzl headlamp. Venus. Orion. Cassiopeia. Ursa Major.

The Milky Way.

It's been years since I've been anywhere dark or still enough to see the Milky Way. I turned off the headlamp and gazed upward, hoping my vertigo would be kind enough to leave me standing while tilting myself in accord with the skies. Another woman stopped and we watched together. One shooting star traversed the black from northeast to southwest. "We used to party in the country, and we could see the Milky Way there," she said.

I named the larger constellations for her. I thought about sleeping on the deck of my suburban family home as a teenager, the neighborhood kids all there in their sleeping bags; I would wake several times in the night and measure how far Cassiopeia had turned, or measure the five-times-distant North Star, and take some reassurance in the Grand Dance.

Tonight the atoms in my body separated, diffusing into the Universe, and in turn, the Universe became matter and traded itself into me, cell by cell, particle by particle. There was less of me and more of it until we reached equilibrium in the vast soup of Time.