Fear of Missing Out
Rare, incomparable, spectacular, magical… just some of the words tossed around; describing the astronomical astonishment they called the super blue blood moon. The same words will most likely be used in headlines for the succeeding phenomena expected throughout the year. The same word could most likely be used to describe a more astounding phenomenon right here on the planet.
Traditional and digital media have hyped it up so much, it seemed like the sky was going to hold the concert of the millennium. This made everyone want to be a part of it; surprisingly, everyone, including me. We drove around with take-out, ready and eager to witness the most talked about event. The spot we picked, on most other nights, would have been full of cars with kids, or more appropriately, kids with cars. Blaring pop music accentuated with the syncopated clinking of beer bottles would have filled the air. This isn’t one of those nights; dark, even with two street lights looming overhead; serene, even with a crowd slowly swelling up. This isn’t one of those nights, because tonight, the moon is a star; the biggest star of this cosmic concerto. Somehow, at least for tonight, the world had gone quiet, in anticipation of what was to be a surreal experience.
The clock read 8:32. We were on our last few bites of chicken when I decided to look out from the car window. I was eager to see what was supposed to be an abnormally large, remarkably bright, and unmistakably red moon. Straining to twist my neck around, trying to get a glimpse of this one-night wonder, I figured, I wasn’t facing the right way. A cold, light breeze, blew past me when I finally decided to step out of the driver’s seat. A group of men just a few meters away struggled to keep their heads up and parked next to me, was a family of five coming out from their car. Every one of them was trying to capture the beauty and splendor of this heavenly sight. Every one of them determined to capture a moment that would soon be immortalized, in stories… both FB and IG… that is at least until the next riveting moment in their respectively sensational social media lives. For around an hour, the world around me stood still. Everywhere I looked I could see heads and phones pointing towards the skies; individual and personal observatories, fascinated by a slightly disappointing sight but fixated on the next new hot item on their news feed. With a red glow, the moon drifted in and out of a cloudy sky. I drifted in and out of consciousness struggling to stay up.
My phone stayed in my pocket while I was looking at everyone taking photos. I never bothered to take it out because I had already captured this once. I have a memory from my younger years, of a moon so big and bright I could see each crater clearly; A memory from a time when the pager was just making its way out. I remember crossing the street and seeing it over the horizon. It glowed with a warm yellow, just hovering off the top of the houses in front of me. That definitely wasn’t called ‘super’, ‘blue’ or ‘blood moon’. I don’t know what it was and why it went unreported, but, it is an image that will stay with me until my last breath, or until the onset of severe memory loss. I may be the only one with this particular memory, and maybe this recent super blue blood moon is the closest I’ll get to that again. Then, it started, that nagging feeling that this could quite possibly be the last time I’ll ever get to see the moon as radiant and red.
If that childhood memory had happened at this day and age, would I have grabbed my phone?
Science says we do have control over what gets committed to either short term or long term memory. Some people would say that this is the exact reason they post everything online, to eternally have it engrained in a seemingly, much larger, more reliable storage, somewhere in the US. What about me? By choosing not to put it out on my wall, am I being too selective of the moments I want to keep? Was this moment not special enough? Am I too pompous to participate in the current craze? But there was a moment there I wanted to keep. There was a memory I will never want to forget.
It wasn’t the moon.
It wasn’t something I could take a picture of. No current technology could preserve an accurate image of this worldly phenomenon. It was a feeling; a kind of happiness and security that that moment, whether it was remarkable enough or not, was being shared with someone special.
As everyone was looking up, I was looking somewhere else, at the reason I even went out in the first place, safe in knowing that even without the moon, I had someone to guide me through the dark.
*photo by noah silliman from unsplash.com
