Pibrac, Haute-Garonne, France


It was far from obvious that, on that cool evening in September 2023, I would find myself as I did—sitting cross-legged on a slab of granite, my gaze lost in the vastness of the American sky.

When my partner Julie and I first imagined this “Starry Walk,” back in 2020, the planets were anything but aligned. A global health crisis was sweeping across the world. Most countries had chosen to close their borders. This measure, intended to curb movement and thus contagion, was among the first to be enforced, and it was applied with rigor. The French moved within an ever-tightening perimeter: first the nation, then the region, then the city—until, at last, that single square kilometer that formed an invisible cage around each citizen.

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For Julie, Iris, and Apolline, my ever-guiding stars.

“The stars are in the sky as letters are in a book.”
— Maximus the Confessor

Below Forester Pass, California
10:30 p.m.

My phone had set an alarm I didn’t need. I woke before it went off.

I loosened my sleeping bag and brushed the tent walls with my fingertips. The fine mesh of the mosquito net—my makeshift canopy—hung inches from my face. The poles had bent, the stakes had come loose. No matter how deep I drove them—heel or rock—they slipped free in the sandy ground at the slightest movement.

This is how my nights went: the slow, inevitable collapse of my canvas shelter, until by dawn it had flattened out, sometimes shaped only by the rise of my bent knees.

Around me, small objects glinted in the dark—the zipper of my sleeping bag, the clasp of my headlamp. I found the tent opening and slid the pull.

Outside, it was night.

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