For Every Missing Shade

Entry 35

I woke up to breakfast with Emma and her family before they were seen off at the airport. We drove north into the more mountainous parts of Arizona once again. Snow covered the ground as the terrain became more rocky. We stopped at a rest station in Flagstaff where she insisted that she wanted to drive, risks be damned.

I tried to fight her on it, but she went into an admittedly well-researched plan where if she's going to do some of her last driving on Earth, then it should be on what are statistically the safest roads: highways.

I tossed her the keys before getting into the shotgun seat. She got into the driver's seat as if it was her first time. She rolled down the windows, put on her favorite playlist, and began the drive.

She said, "Now I know this might sound rude, but if you want to nap, now is the time. I'm just going to be rocking out and enjoying this, so I would appreciate a false sense of privacy."

"Sounds good to me," I said. I kissed her on the cheek and tried my best to doze off with the sound of music blasting in the background.

--

I woke up to Emma talking to a park ranger.

"Yeah, we have two people and this car," she said

"That sounds good. Here's some information about the campsite. You can drive right up to it. There's going to be a small walk of about a hundred yards, but nothing too much."

"Amazing, where is it?" she asked.

"Right forward and then take a hard left at the fork. You're going to keep on that road for a couple of miles and then you'll see the signs. Your campsite is going to be beautiful, it's overlooking the canyon. Right on the edge."

"Thank you," she responded as the ranger lifted the gate to let us through.

I realized with a start that we were at the Grand Canyon. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I started to get excited.

We wound through roads as glimpses of the canyon peeked in and out of our view. They only lasted for seconds at a time, but already I could see why people obsessed over it. It was hard to comprehend what I was looking at, but nothing compared to what we found at our campsite.

It laid on a patch of glorified rock about a hundred feet away from a ledge. That ledge served as a front-row seat to one of the greatest national wonders in the world.

It was breathtaking.

I took out two foldable chairs and Emma told me to put them right by the edge. December in the Grand Canyon was apparently still below freezing, so we piled blankets on top of us.

I carried over some logs to our fire pit and started a fire. Emma got some hot dogs from the cooler as well as the sticks to roast them on.

We sat around the fire as our minds got lost wandering through the canyon. Never before had I seen such detail in one place. The pale red of the canyon rose out of the rivers rushing below until it met the pale cloudless sky. Snow crunched under our feet as the fire danced underneath our food.

"What are we checking off here?" I asked.

"Well, other than going camping, it's time for me to feel tiny," she responded.

"And this is doing it?"

"I felt huge on that mountain. I felt invincible, on top of the world. And now this is making me feel smaller. I mean, the view is a lot like what it would be on top of a mountain, but it's different. I'm not higher off the ground, but I'm looking at this enormous thing. Better yet, this enormous thing is actually super tiny when you put it in perspective.

"This goes on for miles, I can't even see where it ends. And yet, it's not even significant compared to what else is on Earth. If you looked at a globe you couldn't even see it. And then there's me, not even a thousandth of a percent of this canyon. I'm a speck; insignificant even to insignificant things."

"Not to me," I said plainly.

"No, not to you," she agreed. "But I'm also not saying this to tell a sob story. It's not sad at all for me. Maybe it gives me a little bit of comfort to know that I'm not actually vital to the continuation of Earth after I'm gone. I mean, how could I be okay if I knew that I was going to take everyone else with me.

"Other than that, it's kind of magical," she continued. "I knew what it meant to feel normal on this trip as well as huge, special, and now I'm starting to learn to be microscopic as well. I'm becoming as well-rounded as a teenager is capable of being."

I looked over the canyon once again and agreed with her. It was something so much bigger than me, but it didn't make me feel bad about being insignificant. Small, yes, but also a part of something beautiful. It felt right to feel small next to this because it was never something I could do by myself. It was something much bigger and greater than I was.

"I think I know what you're talking about," I concluded.

"And we're not going to stop with the canyon," she said. "Fun fact about Grand Canyon National Park, it's something called a 'Dark Sky Park' which means that they're committed to making the night sky as visible as possible. That means that we'll be able to get a whole other angle of feeling insignificant; this time against the whole universe."

She got up off of her chair. "I'm feeling a small mid-afternoon nap. Now, if you would like to have all this," she said waving her arms up and down her body, "snuggled right next to that," she said waving at me, "that can maybe be arranged."

"You could be so lucky," I said back as I took one last look at the canyon.

--

We turned off our flashlights at the same time. The sky immediately replaced our light with the shine of a million stars. Constellations blazed into view as uncountable specks of distant light danced across our vision.

Without even the smallest amount of light pollution present, the sky exploded with life. There was a long, thin cluster of stars surrounded by a green and yellow fog that Emma and I concluded was the middle of the Milky Way. The colors of the cosmos faintly embellished our view as bolts of light scattered across the sky relentlessly.

"Last time we did this, you had a playlist didn't you?" she asked.

I thought back to the last time we went stargazing. "That had to be one of our first dates, wasn't it?"

"The second if I'm not mistaken," she responded.

"Well shit," I said with a small laugh. "We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into."

"It feels like forever ago," she said. I could tell by her voice that her mind was somewhere other than our conversation so I let it explore unimpeded.

I reached for my phone and put on the playlist once again. The songs sounded old, but not in a bad way. It was nostalgic. It was a story that was already written, but I forgot how much I wanted to read it again.

I listened to song after song of my old life. The verses took me through quotes I lived by and choruses told me about emotions I had always felt but could never fathom.

I imagined Emma's mind dancing among the stars as she stayed quiet beside me. I wondered what constellations her mind was talking to, what nebula she was flirting with.

It felt like we were in that cornfield once again. Each just beginning to uncover how much we would love each other. A state in which each of us were oblivious to the changes that would catapult our lives into something different.

Of course, different was an understatement.

I just have no idea how else to explain it yet.