Stars

“Only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars”

-MLK

This is one of my favorite quotes I’ve ever read, and it becomes more and more true each year. It is typically used for extremely harsh and dark times, like times of war, or civil injustice, but I believe that it is a great guideline to live by even in everyday situations. I believe that life sends us little signals or opportunities to find “the stars”, or sometimes, it’s even literal, which is what happened to me.

This past break, I celebrated my 18th birthday. I was so excited to enter adulthood, but extremely nervous about college, taxes, and being able to go to real jail (don’t know why I was scared of that). But there was one thing I was definitely looking forward to, and it was hosting all of my friends at my house and having a little party. I had been planning it for months, going shopping with my friends and setting up tables and food. When the day came, it started off as a blast; everyone was having such a good time with good conversations and music. However, tragedy struck towards the end. I had one rule with my friends over: no one could make a mess in our living room. A girl who was a friend of one of my teammates, who I didn’t even know, was seen eating a whole lot of pizza slices, claimed she got food poisoning and vomited all over my living room carpet as I was walking one of my friends inside. Just as this happened, my parents, after a hard day at work, walked into the house. I was terrified, and all I could do was start crying. Some of my friends got so scared of all the screaming that they left, and my parents threw my cake in the trash to make room to clean the mess. Every single fear I had ever had in my whole life flooded my head, and I started crying of guilt. 

However, it was at that moment I saw my close friends step up and save the night. They knew how much trouble I would be in, and they wanted to calm me down on my birthday. The amount of support I received was immeasurable, and I am so grateful to have found the amount of platonic love in friendships that I have today. I was so scared that this ruined party was going to set the tone for my entrance to adulthood, that I don’t have control, and that I was irresponsible. I felt that I wasn’t ready for anything. I went to bed that night defeated, my parents agreed to my friends’ extreme begging and pleading to let me go out the next night before my eventual grounding. So that’s exactly what we did, my friends picked me up the next night and did not even tell me where we were going, but by the route, it looked like Laguna Beach, one of our favorite spots. My spirits were automatically lifted by just being around such positive energies, and I was not even upset anymore to find out that we had driven all that way to find out that the beach was closed. We didn’t give up and drove a little up the coast, a beach close to Newport less lit up. We set up blankets on the sand and just layed down and talked. We realized that from a beach as dark as this, the stars were so bright, and none of us had seen real constellations and stargazed in years. And in this moment on the sand laying down on a random beach with them, in my messed up birthday makeup from the night before, I saw the stars literally, and I saw them in my friends too.