Nobody is dancing. That is the first thing you notice. Two hundred kids in a gymnasium and the whole floor is empty, boys pressed against one wall, girls against the other, a stretch of polished hardwood between them lit up purple by a rented light. Somebody spent money on that light. There is a folding table with a bowl of orange punch and a stack of napkins nobody has touched.
I keep watching one kid near the bleachers. He has been working up to crossing that floor for maybe forty minutes. You can see it in his shoulders. He takes a half step out, checks his shoes, retreats. Does it again. The distance he is trying to cross is about thirty feet.
I have looked at this planet from two hundred and fifty miles up. From there you cannot see a single border. Not one. All the lines we draw, all the sides we pick, none of it survives the trip to orbit; it is just one blue thing, and the air that keeps every person on it breathing is thinner than the shell of an egg. Everything that has ever mattered to anybody happened inside that shell.
And here is this kid, standing at the edge of thirty feet of gym floor, and it might as well be the whole distance I traveled. It is the same courage. Exactly the same. The willingness to leave the wall you know and move out into the open where anyone can see you and it might go badly.
He went. Halfway through a song I didn't recognize, he just went, straight across, and asked. I couldn't hear what she said.
I hope she said yes.
From up there, you learn how rare it is that anything reaches across the dark at all.