I check my pocket to ensure that I have my keys and mobile, and step out into the freezing air, hurrying toward the Mississippi.
Getting up to see an astronomical event is, well, lonely. I'll admit that while I didn't invite anyone to stay up with me to watch tonight's eclipse (mainly because after years of asking I've discovered most people aren't interested) I thought I might run into at least one other person awake, particularly because astronomical events that you can actually see in the city are unusual.
But 2:10am finds me standing alone on a bridge over the Mississippi, looking up at the Blood Moon, feeling like the only person awake in the world.
Despite the loneliness, the eclipse is something I revel in.
***
Somewhere along the way I confused "reflecting on your sins for the sake of atoning for them" and "relishing your sins."
I'm definitely relishing.
I can't help it. I'm at the Easter Vigil with my folks and it's close to a three hour service. Three hours. Three hours of church for an atheist. On a Saturday night.
I go because it's my atonement for moving so far away and coming home so infrequently. I know that it means something to my parents to have me there with them, and I am almost never home over Easter, so I might as well do this for them. But as everyone who has ever attended a Catholic wedding knows, just because you're there doesn't mean you're paying attention. We're wrapping up Lent so there's a lot of talk about sinfulness and Christ's triumph over Original Sin and I can't help it (not that I really want to), I can't stop thinking about the past year. Oddly enough, despite twenty-six years of Catholic indoctrination, it's not the big sins that are getting to me (not to say that I'm not thinking of them. More on that in a minute). It's the little failings from the past year, times when I could have been kinder, less dismissive, worked harder, loved with fewer conditions that I'm atoning for at the moment.
The big ones though, the ones that would come off that list of seven.
Those are are things I would not repent if Jesus Christ were standing in front of me personally offering me a place in heaven.
I suspect everyone has sins like that. Mine tend to fall along the same lines, regardless of how old I get. Long boozy dinners with heaps of inappropriate jokes that leave my sides aching and head splitting the next day. Arguments where, just briefly, I let my temper get the better of me. After hours that leave me trembling and breathless and thinking I forgot it could be like that.
Like I said, things I wouldn't atone for if my (after)life depended on it.
***
When I get back into the house I am freezing. It's the kind of cold I know I won't be able to shake and that will keep me up for awhile, so I make a cup of herbal tea and wrap myself around my heating pad. Getting up this late, especially after so little sleep, was a silly idea. I'm going to be exhausted and not worth much for in the morning and I'm reasonably certain I'll be paying for this for the rest of the week.
I don't care.
It's unusual for me to feel that way surrounding sleep (lifetime insomnia has made me hyper-aware of the beauty of a full eight hours), but when it comes to staying up late to see something incredible (especially related to space) I feel like I have to do it. I go out in the early morning and stay up as late as a possibly can on the off chance of seeing the Aurora or the Perseids because it's my way of saying thank you to the universe. Our lives are such brief, unlikely things that I feel like I owe it to the universe to experience as much as I can.
It's a thought that will follow me to two-and-half hours into the Easter Vigil, when I'll guiltily snap back into the present. Our lives our so brief, and yeah, some things are worth atoning for, some things are worth skipping.
And some things are meant simply to be relished.
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