Our First Comet!

📻🎤👑

Over the next few days, Meda showed me a whole different view of the universe that I never even knew existed. It was always there, pretty as could be while it twinkled above me, but that was only half of what it had to offer.

This telescope, such a simple looking antique, was a literal gateway to the stars, expanding what looked like nothing more than small dots into admittedly fuzzier, bigger dots, but I didn't knock it for that.

Right now, Meda was comet hunting, looking for a big one that was said to appear above the horizon after sunset. She mentioned it being special, so my hopes were as high as the notes I could hit in an Aerosmith song.

While she was busy fine tuning the scope to see that, I’d brought one of my mobile radios with me to deal with the long stretches of downtime…

“-and today marks the unfortunate ninth anniversary of the loss of the Cetus spacecraft and all hands on board. It’s a reminder of the dangers of space travel, but the tenacity of the human spirit. Since then, we’ve bolstered safety protocols and inspections of-”

“Moment of silence for the lost,” I uttered in a soft tone, passively mourning the long since passed tragedy.

“Eh?” she squeaked as her head momentarily jerked away from the telescope. “Mhmm. Aahamm?”

I’d learned she tended to mutter her thoughts out loud when she got focused on something. She didn't realize it though and I thought it was cute, so I didn’t say anything.

To get her attention, I usually either tapped the telescope or poked her with a pointer stick. She hated the former because it messed with the delicate angle of the telescope…

So poker stick it was!

“Yamate…” Her clumsy Japanese had been getting a little better lately, courtesy of my coaching.

I poked her again.

She gave me a murderous side eye, so I backed off and just watched. I guess she hated the poker stick too.

From then on, she was back and forth between the telescope, her book, and the phone app. She wouldn’t let me peek into anything, but from some brief glances I saw she was trying to get her app to lock onto exact coordinates somewhere.

The telescope wasn’t on the horizon though, at least from what I could see. It was looking a little upwards, and based on the look I got of her app from over her shoulder, there wasn’t anything there of interest.

“Ha?” she cheered. “Mohmm… Mmm…”

Whatever she was looking at, it stole her focus completely.

“Maka-jan!” she waved me over. “Mmm.”

She pointed to her book and slowly performed sign language gestures. I used my phone to find a chart of all the different hand gestures and interpreted them as best I could.

“You’re…stuck on a rock… And a monster is trying to eat you?” I interpreted.

“Eeeh?!” She looked appalled at my translation. “Maka!”

She took hold of my phone and flipped it around.

“Oh!” I was holding my phone upside down. She redid her gestures again for my convenience. “You…uh…want me to take a look into the telescope, then your space app.”

She nodded, stepping back to give me room to take a peek.

Inside the telescope I got a hazy view of some source of dim light with two tails stretched out. One long, straight and blue one heading upwards from our point of view, and the other trailing behind and forming a long cloud of yellow and white. Sure looked like a comet to me! Very colorful indeed.

She poked my side and I jittered at her touch. Then she showcased and confirmed that this part of the sky wasn’t supposed to have anything of interest.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

She signed to me that the comet that we were looking at wasn’t the special one she was originally looking for. This was a different one, and her app didn’t have it logged in yet, so she didn’t know what to call it.

Using the exact coordinates in the sky, she was going to search it up on a different database to find out what it was…

…But we had a big problem. It was 5:56 PM. Time flew by while we were so focused and we had to get Meda back to school ASAP!

I was all kinds of panic, rushing to get all our gear cleaned up in time, but Meda was surprisingly relaxed about getting packed up like we had all the time in the world…

☄️🔭📘

Dad didn't ever get to the school at 6 sharp like he said he would. It was always anywhere from fifteen to twenty minutes afterwards. Now, this was a punctual man who had every moment of his day mapped out to a T. If one thing was out of order, it was all ruined and he’d go to bed like he’d missed the winning free throw of a championship game.

He also hated to keep me waiting in the metaphorical rain. Contrary to how he wanted life to work to his benefit, it was the other way around and the chaotic last few days of getting me after work proved that to him.

His work had been keeping him longer. Lately he’d been extra overloaded from a big lawsuit case around game emulation. I wouldn't call any of those things straw, but they were breaking the camel's back. Dad had been such an uptight mess.

Whenever he got like that, it wound me up so bad that I just hated being around him. Loved my dad a lot, but I needed my free time to decompress. And honestly it would have done him some good too, but he was a workaholic. I hated thinking that there was a silver lining to him showing up late, but it always gave me some time to mentally prepare myself to see him and his fancy limo again.

So, today, I just didn’t stress about things and stayed with Baka just a little longer than normal. It wasn’t all to give myself space to breathe, because Hade’s personality could be a little suffocating too. But I actually found something weird…

We were comet hunting tonight. Hade told me he’d never seen one, and I’d had the privilege of actually spotting one from my window one night a few years back. It was amazing, and actually one of my first ever memories.

The comet we were looking for tonight was known as 0-2008 Cassiopia, named after the constellation she was discovered in. If it wasn’t obvious, this was the first one I saw for myself.

The problem was that there were too many clouds in the way to really see it. The weather said it was going to rain later too.

But for the most part the sky was clear enough to see other spots. Which brought me to a different comet. This one was smaller and not even logged into the night sky app I used. Even though it was dim, it was vibrant with color.

I made sure to log everyth-

Why was Hade poking me in the side with that dumb finger pointer again?

If it wasn’t clear to him before, my evil eye stare should have been enough to tell him I was not having that.

His voice had a certain vibration to it when he talked to me, like he was always talking really loudly, thinking my ears would pick up on it…which, they couldn’t. But I got good at knowing when he wanted to grab my attention.

I also noticed he really was an attention hog. DUH, RIGHT?! Well, there was more to it. If someone didn’t acknowledge him, he got all freaky, like something was really bothering him about it. That was really apparent with our first interaction, but I thought he was just being weird at the time. Now it seemed like there was more to it, as if the attention were as necessary as the air itself. I wasn’t ready to ask him about that though, because it meant I’d have to be vulnerable about my own past in return.

Honestly, I’d rather forget the things I went through. Remembering being bullied for things out of my control did not make the days feel any shorter.

Anyways, I didn’t have my computer with me, and smart phones were pretty great and all, but I didn’t have access to the same star map apps. I made a log of the location where I found this new comet to look it up later.

Who knows? Maybe I just discovered a new one? Ha! Fat chance in these days of discovering anything!

Hmm…? Oh. Hade was signaling we needed to head back to school. Yeah, alright. Guess we couldn’t stay out forever, could we?