You’re at the park near your house, walking your dog, and you stop for a moment to look up, to feel the pulse of the firs as they flicker orange in the light. Playing behind them, in tandem, almost as if a filter screen has been transposed over it, you see just as clearly a single night almost fifteen years ago, in college, when you spent the night alone in the Cascades as part of a backcountry survival class, and you are right back there, in that pale stillness, feeling the cold air rising from the ground as you strike flint with callused hands, over and over, unable to get a flame to catch in the bundle of lichen, and you remember, just as well, how you gave up when the sun set, how you huddled under your tarp shelter, the smell of plastic and fir needles mixing with the smoke of your classmate’s successful fires, and you remember how you pulled the fleece blanket over your head, the balled-up texture of it scratching against your face, and how you came out of that cocoon only once in the night, to see if the stars were there, and you had to walk a little until you found a pocket of them, a crack between the firs, and you stood there, hunched, shivering, the cold deep in your muscles, the clouds dark and coursing, an old and placid fear tied up in all of it, the scattering of stars pressed into your mind for the rest of your life, like ink long-bled onto paper.