What did we lose when we gained comfort and control?

"I'm so glad we're doing this." she said swinging her leg over the cold metal fence, "I needed a little adventure, besides, doing something that's kind of illegal just makes things more fun."

"Kind of illegal? kind of illegal?," his voice rose incredulously. "Try just plain illegal." She laughed in the dark.

"Only if you get caught."

"How would we explain this to a police officer?" he shone the flashlight on her. "He just found two college kids out in field. I don't think he'd be very understanding."

"It's not like we're stealing or damaging anything. We just want to go somewhere where we could see the stars."

"Yeah, I'm sure he'd buy that."

They trudged through the field. The grass was dried by winter and smelled as though it had been freshly cut. The moon above was so bright it was like the bulb of a lighthouse, beckoning the wanderers forward into a strange place of nothingness. There was no one else, only they and the moon.

"It's so peaceful," he said as they lay back on a slightly sloping hill. The night sky closed over them like a blue bowl trapping them there in that moment, in that separate world. Constellations were visible, but the moon's brightness made them seem small and insignificant. Their hands reached up, tracing pictures in the stars and outlining the man's face in the moon.

"He's kind of ugly," she said wrinkling her nose.

"Do his eyebrows kind of go in? I see him too!" They rolled on the ground laughing at the scowling man in the sky. He looked down on them haughty and disapproving.

"It's funny, I never really took the time to look for him before."

Thoughts seemed numb in their minds, and the silence enveloped them like a cold, yet still comforting, blanket. It felt strangely like being underwater. The pressure of the quiet, the chilled breeze that was like a current, and the blue moonlight made the illusion all the more believable. Perhaps the moon was a round jellyfish and they were drowning in the universe's magnitude.
They were flecks of dust in a desert, bubbles in the ocean, fireflies compared to stars.

"It's almost like..."

"An out of body experience." She had the habit of finishing sentences for him. "Like we're watching someone in a movie. Characters do things like this, see things like this. Normal people like us just don't."

"Yeah, exactly," he breathed to the blinking stars.

It was strange how simplicity had become magical, and how all that was ancient seemed strangely new and undiscovered.