By Leah Gaush
There wasn’t ever an announcement made by NASA that 15-year-old me didn’t know about. I believed in the ripples in the creek behind my house, and I believed in the magic that Hubble revealed. It was simple: I was sick of human complexity, so I turned to God’s. Indigo black and diamonds overhead, I took our ugliest beach towel to the backyard and laid on the deck looking for meteors. My mother was on the verge of breaking every dish she washed when she realized I had slipped from the dinner table and disappeared. It was simple, I told her. There was a show going on and the only ticket required was that you were in this hemisphere and not in the other. She laid with me for a moment, and I tried to train her 43-year-old eyes to see the specks streaking across the sky. Frustration bubbled in her like forgotten spaghetti water on a burner, and soon, she was gone. She wasn’t ever good at paying attention. That skill I learned from the brains at NASA, the ones cross-examining God.