Under the Stars

The Perfect "Date"

Dear Carla,

I was once asked what my perfect date would be. Where would it be? When would it be? Who would it be with? After giving it some thought I realized I had already had it. It went like this. It happened during the trip we took the summer after high school when we borrowed my aunts RV and drove around the island. The whole time there was only one place I needed to go. Mt. Cook. Everything else was a bonus. That's where my perfect "date" was. It started at 12:00 am. We hiked the Red Tarns trail so we were on top of the mountain. I put down a picnic blanket and we lay down next to each other so we could gaze up at the stars. Mt. Cook had the best stars we'd ever seen. They sprinkled the sky like glitter with one milky strip down the middle of the sky. The Milky Way. You couldn't look anywhere without seeing stars. At one point I saw a shooting star but there was nothing for me to wish for because I had everything I wanted. We talked about everything. The stupid things we did when we were little like chasing all the boys around at recess in second grade and our terrible fashion senses in sixth grade. About our silly crushes and failed dating lives. Laughing so much our sides ached. We whispered secrets and inside jokes only we knew. But we also talked about deeper things. Why we were disappointed with ourselves, friendships we'd lost and people we'd hurt or who'd hurt us. We talked about the world and how hard it was to watch it slowly dying. We learned things about each other that no-one knew and grew closer than ever before. We talked for hours before the sky started to light up. We didn't know what was going on until we looked over to Mt. Cook and saw it. The southern lights. Painting the sky pink and green and yellow and blue. We had never seen anything so beautiful. We stood there overlooking the valley and the mountains not saying anything. We never needed to. We could sit together for hours not saying anything and it wouldn't be awkward. We stood on what felt like the top of the world for half an hour before the lights started to fade and we went back to the picnic blanket. We started drifting off, the sky still tinged pink the stars twinkling a coded goodnight. Just before I fell asleep I wrote "goodnight" on your leg. I remember we learned how to write on each other in third grade because Mr. Finerty had the ears of the bat and we needed to find a way to talk in class. But you had already fallen asleep. Typical Carla I thought always the first one asleep. Anyways, I guess I wrote this to you because I'm glad I got to spend my perfect "date" with you.

Love, Casey