Most mornings I wake up with half-remembered dreams. They flit in and out of focus, some significance I can’t define pressing on the back of my eyeballs. As I recall some scenes, others slip away. As all but the most vivid bits blink out suddenly or drift away like smoke, I’m often left with an inexplicable lingering sadness.

This morning I woke with no memory of my dreams, but a heavy heart. Half-awake, I tried reaching for what dream might have already faded, but then I realized the thing weighing me down was what I’d read just before falling asleep: The Wandering Stars chapter narrated by Sean in the wake of being ghosted by Orvil.

It is a sad thing to let go of. That everything leaves. But life has too many seasons to get caught up about one of them. And other seasons return. So even though it felt for a time like me and Orvil had been brought together by fate, maybe it was included in that fate that the us of us was just supposed to be for that time that we knew each other.

I’m being asked to understand that with some people you love, they just won’t end up being part of your life. I’m being asked a question that it seems I can answer only by living.

This is my first real post on this blog and so I’m not going deep on the personal stuff, but I’ll say this: the older you get, the more the absent-people-you-love pile up.

People die. People move across the country or drift away, absorbed into orbits that are not your own. And sometimes, like with Orvil, someone you love decides that they can’t or don’t want to ever see you again.

Don’t you feel them out there sometimes, even the ones who died? And wonder if they feel you, too? It’s forever a lot to comprehend, Sean, or at least it is for me. But here we all are, living our lives without them. We’re all wandering stars, maybe, forever missing —

Please read this gem of a Tommy Orange essay on how he came to write Wandering Stars, including how it all started when he was at a book signing for There, There and heard this song:

Really wish I had a book club for this book, there’s so so so much more to talk about! One last thought, for example:

In the firehose of ridiculous and dangerous executive orders on day one of the trump administration, it would be easy to say that declaring Denali to be Mt McKinley again is of relatively small consequence. But ugh, it’s not. There There and Wandering Stars both depict the awful harm of the erasure of native peoples, over the centuries and today. In both books, brimming with characters that feel so real, intimate stories of Native Americans living in the present are woven into the bigger picture in a way that made me understand more deeply than ever before just how much generational trauma hurts.