I was crying. I don’t remember why. I was only six, maybe seven, but the moment is burned into me. My dad took me camping around Sonoma, maybe an hour from our home in Flagstaff. He liked to hike and smoke cigars by a campfire—two things an underweight, unathletic child like me was horribly unequipped to enjoy. He would take me on these death marches in 95-degree afternoon heat, parading me past pink rocks as he ran through his National Geographic-level understanding of ‘geological deep time’ and ‘seismic shifts.’ He always had this fanboy love of hard science.

I spent those days sweating and whining and napping.

From that night, I remember the dark and the cold. Deserts get very cold very quickly, so my teeth chattered away as soon as we got into our sleeping bags. It must’ve kept my dad awake. After I heard him rustle, I let out this little cry, like a kitten caught in mousetrap. He ignored it. The longer he did, the louder my cry got until tears streamed down my cheeks and I reached out to him. He gave me attention and held me. It’s actually the only time I can remember how he felt. He was strong. I could feel his muscles through the slick insulation of the sleeping bag. And he was so warm.

“Let’s go look at the stars,” he said.

He bundled me up in some jackets and blankets and carried me out of our tent. A sliver of smoke still streamed out of our fire’s embers, probably from the cigar stub my dad flung in right before bed. I looked at it for a long time, the red flecks prickling the gray-blue all around us. I almost fell asleep there, staring at it in my dad’s arms before he shook me back to reality.

“Hey, boy,” he said. “Look up.”

It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

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There were more stars than I thought the sky could ever hold. Thousands of them. Millions of them. There was so much light. So much that you couldn’t make out any constellations. They were all jumbled. Or I guess you could find about a hundred Big Dippers bleeding right into a legion of Orions. And the Milky Way. The Milky Way! It shaded the sky with this orange haze. Softened it. It laced all those stars together into a cosmic Persian rug. It turned the night into something so perfect it looked fake.

It sucked me in. I could’ve stared at it for hours. I asked my dad if we could sleep outside. He smiled—a real, sweet smile—and went back to the tent. My dad and I never understood each other much, but in that moment, he must’ve been the only other person who saw outside our tiny pinprick of the universe. He came back with our pillows and sleeping bags and smoothed them out on a patch of dirt.

I don’t remember how long I stayed awake, but the stars seeped into my dreams. I got closer to them. They lifted me up, sucking me past the rushing wind, the chilling sky, and even the unfeeling nothingness as I reached them.

I didn’t know it then, but that night was my welcome into the rest of civilization.

After flying past the stars, I passed what seemed like the Milky Way, or some kind of shroud of dust and rocks. I kept going, accelerating but motionless, until everything around me was pitch black. Then I heard footsteps. Three people came into view in the distance, giving dimensions to a huge, dark room. I couldn’t really tell where they were coming from with their steps echoing all around me. But then it was like I blinked, and they were right there in front of me. They looked like nothing or no one I’d ever seen before. They had hollow faces and lanky bodies with firm, brown skin. They stood well over six feet with wingspans just as long. They wore elaborate gold robes with blue geometric patterns running along the trimming. Each of them radiated a pale halo.

I thought they were angels.

The one in the center could tell I was freaked out. It bent down to my height. A smile came across its face—the same soft smile my dad gave me earlier.

“You’re alright,” it said.

“What are you?” I asked.

“I’m a human, just like you. Don’t worry. We’ll be seeing a lot more of each other in due time. But for now, get some sleep.”

Then it kissed my forehead and I fell back into the stars.