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I Could Use a Dream or a Genie or a Wish
One of Keith’s earliest memories is of his birthday. His mother shaking him awake somewhere around 2am with a soft, “Happy birthday babydoll. Let’s go look at the stars.” She’d carried him outside in her arms, still wrapped up in his soft fleece blanket and he remembers the smell of the desert night, the tang of cold dry air, the warm bands of his mother’s arms tight around his little body. He’d tucked his head under her chin and felt the vibrations in her throat as she hummed under her breath, rocking the two of them together under a sky full of glittering stars.
Keith Kogane was born on the darkest day of the year, winter solstice, the turning point between the rising moon and the setting sun. And every year, for as long as he could remember, his mom would wake him up in the middle of the night on his birthday and they’d go outside wrapped up in blankets and look at the stars together and every year she’d tell him the same stories about the constellations she’d told him a million times before and he’d lean against her shoulder and let his eyes unfocus and breathe in the desert air and wonder what it must be like to be a piece of a star, bright, burning and untouchable.
…
When Keith was in Phoenix, after one month, then two had passed and Shiro coming for him was more of a hope than a certainity he wondered what he would do if he couldn’t see the stars on his birthday. Sixteen was creeping closer and closer and the stars had never felt further away in a city whose light washed them all away.
…
Sixteen happened in another city that ate up the stars and Keith tried not to feel a sense of loss for something so small as stargazing and so massive as his mom. (Her absence was a black hole, a dead star, and would drag him in and snuff him out if he let it so he didn’t, he ran away from the feeling, as far away as he could).
But then Shiro brought out a nightlight, a kid’s toy. About the size of a soccer ball, the outside was a dome with cartoonish five-pointed stars of varying size cut out of it and if you plugged it in it lit up inside and the dome turned, sending star-shaped light shadows dancing around the dark room.
He smiled a little sheepishly at Keith’s dumbfounded face; his own underlit strangely by the nightlight in front of him. “Mom said you guys would look at the stars on your birthday.”
“But you can’t see the stars in the city,” Keith said flatly, at a loss.
“So I brought the stars to you?” Shiro said, a little awkward, a little unsure, “I know, it’s lame, but…”
“You’re a dumbass,” Keith told him bluntly and hugged him with all his strength.
…
“I was born on the darkest day of the year,” Keith told his college boyfriend once, comtemplatively.
“Chill out, edgelord,” he’d said, not understanding.
He wasn’t really a boyfriend so much as a consistent fuckbuddy so Keith told himself that the comment didn’t hurt, that the lack of understanding was only natural. The relationship wasn’t real; he couldn’t expect someone to just know him.
Keith knows how closed off he is.
Keith is okay with it.
Keith watches the artificial stars thrown out by Shiro’s nightlight in his darkened dorm room and thinks about how comforting the dark can be.
…
Keith likes the dark; Keith grew up on darkness and desert nights and skies full of stars. The night is quiet to Keith without being too quiet. The world gets loud, grating on every last nerve sometimes but in the nighttime it feels softer, muffled, muted. There is something sacred about being the only one awake in the world. There is something profound about being side-by-side and silent with another human being in the blue time before the sun falls from the sky.
…
Upstate Keith can see the stars again and that first night after he moves he feels something crack open in his chest like a safe, something finally released into the night sky where he belongs.
He puts sticky stars on his ceiling and watches them every night like a child, tracing the constellations, real and imagined he painstakingly picked out and telling himself half-forgotten fairytales in the dark.
…
Winter solstice is different this far north. There’s snow to send the glittering light back up to the stars in the middle of the night and Keith’s breath in the cold night air even looks a little different here. He wraps himself in his warmest coat and stands on the porch anyway. He’d climb on the roof but even he’s not stupid enough to try that in the dark with all the ice everywhere.
Inside, Shiro’s nightlight is spinning and when Keith gets too cold and admits defeat he’ll go back inside and watch it for a while, eat a cupcake over his kitchen sink at 3am and drink champagne out of a coffee mug and it should be sad and lonely and pathetic but instead it feels soft and sweet and poetic. He’ll pour a second coffee mug of champage for his mom, he thinks. He doesn’t like champagne that much. He can spare some for a ghost.
…
His first birthday with Lance is different. There’s another person in his bed to grumble sleepily when he gets up in the middle of the night as the clock ticks over to December 21st.
“Whassat?” Lance mumbles, grasping fingers catching on the back of Keith’s shirt.
“It’s my birthday,” Keith says, “I’m going to look at the stars.” He doesn’t know why he says that. Normal Keith would say something vague, make sure his bedmate goes back to sleep, then slip out like a cat escaping into the night. But this is Lance. And there is a part of Keith, a part he has not managed to successfully quell or kill over the past twenty-five, now twenty-six years, that wants someone to know him. And for the past almost-year that hypothetical person has been Lance.
He wants Lance to know him.
And so when Lance flops out of bed, yawning and groggy and mumbles, “Can I come with?” he nods mutely and takes his hand.
They stand on the porch, shoulder to shoulder, and watch the stars.
“I was born on the darkest day of the year,” Keith says.
Lance yawns, “I hope you mean literally.”
“Yeah.”
“Cool,” Lance rests his head on Keith’s shoulder, “Tell me about the stars.”
And Keith does.