The tape had gone yellow behind the glow-in-the-dark stars. My mother had stuck them to the ceiling when I was maybe eight, in a pattern that wasn't any real constellation, just wherever her arm could reach standing on the mattress. I hadn't looked at them in years. You stop seeing the ceiling of a room you've slept under ten thousand nights.
Peeling them off left little gray ghosts in the plaster, the shape of a sky nobody would recognize.
Here is the thing nobody tells you. Everything I owned as a child fit into four cardboard boxes and one trash bag. The dents in the doorframe where they'd penciled my height. The window I'd learned the whole neighborhood through. All of it, the entire world of one small person, contained in a room roughly the size of the module I later slept in for six months, going around the planet every ninety minutes.
From up there the atmosphere is a thin blue line on the horizon, thinner than you'd ever believe, thinner than the skin on an apple, and everyone you have ever loved is under it. You cannot see a single house. You certainly cannot see a bedroom.
I know how small the room was. I measured smaller rooms against harder vacuums.
But I stood there with a wad of plastic stars in my fist and understood that this was where the whole thing started, the looking up. That somebody stood on my bed and reached as high as she could and gave me a sky to fall asleep under, on purpose, so the dark would have something in it.
I put the stars in my shirt pocket.
You don't box those.