A crisp, starry night- like out of the painting. It was probably around late October or early November- that unsettling time of year when the air has a slight hint of chill, but is yet to lose the humid remains of summer. The sky was deep, dark, and sprinkled with stars. The only light came from the crescent moon showing its sliver of brightness, and the warm light of my kitchen in the only open window. The yard was bordered by tall trees- their usual dark green looked even dimmer against the void of sky. I crawled under the house and dragged out an old, rickety Adirondack chair that we had bought for a dollar from our neighbors about a year ago. The legs made a scraping noise as they dragged through the damp soil and grass. I put down my things and I sat down in the chair and I looked up at the sky. And then I waited. For a while. 

    “You’re crazy,” my family had said when I told them what I wanted to do. 

But I have always been stubborn, what can I say? I read online a few weeks ago that tonight would be some kind of crazy Mars sighting that only happens every thirty years or something. I'm definitely not one of those kids who knows everything about space, but I've always liked the night sky. There's just something mysterious about it- I can't put my finger on what it is. 

    So I told my family that I really, really wanted to see Mars- and they told me that they highly discouraged it, but they weren't going to stop me. And no way in hell could I make them come. So hence my lonely, late-night set up in my yard, as I sat in the eerie silence and prayed not to be eaten by a bear. First, five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen, then twenty, and then I was getting tired, bored, cold, and a little spooked. I considered going back inside, but I knew that if I missed something awesome like this, I would never forgive myself. 

    So I sat, and waited, and waited. I didn't like the quiet. It was too quiet. It felt like at any second, something or someone would come out of the woods and eat me. I felt like I was inside one of those jumpscare videos one of my friends made me watch once- where everything is quiet and peaceful and all of a sudden something jumps out of nowhere.  

All that could be heard were the crickets, and even they seemed to be encouraging me through their soft chirping to go back inside. 

    Where was Mars? It was supposed to be out half an hour ago. I decided to address something I could control, the silence. I scrolled through Apple Music on my phone looking for an appropriate song, until I found one that seemed appropriate. I hit play and a few seconds later, the familiar piano introduction started to play and seemed to fill every creepy crevice in the sky, and then David Bowie's voice rang out with "It's a god-awful small affair, to the girl with the mousy hair..." And I kept waiting and as soon as it got the chorus and on the most perfect timing ever as he started to sing "sailors fighting in the dance hall..." I looked up and there it was. It wasn't as big or as bright as it looked in that Nasa article, but it was definitely Mars-I could tell because it was bigger than the stars and it had a very subtle orange tint to it, like when my dad would hold a flashlight under his chin to scare us when we were younger. Mars even had an air of confidence to it, like it knew that it was bigger and brighter than everything else I could see in the sky and it knew that there were kids like me, staying out late at night and waiting to witness its glory.

    I know that people talk about remembering for the rest of their lives the first time they saw the Grand Canyon or the Northern Lights, but I think that for the rest of my life I will remember the first time I saw Mars.