We were somewhere in Mississippi when she asked me to pull over.

"For fresh air," she said, "and to look at the Milky Way."

At two in the morning on a two-lane highway in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Mississippi, I didn't even check the mirrors.  It was a pretty cloudless night; there were a few high floating stratus clouds near the moon, which was just over the horizon.  It was rare that the air was as clear as it was on that night, even so far away from the cities, with all their traffic and their factories and their light pollution.  Cicadas and crickets sang out in a chorus in the night, frogs replied in equally triumphant voices, heralding their victory, though perhaps a temporary one, over mankind's developmental sprawl.  I shut off the car, turned the radio off, and killed the lights.  Prometheus floated out of the back windows, spiraling in a counterclockwise rotation. 

We stood by the highway for what could have been hours, no traffic passing by, no one in the world but us.  The sky was ours, luminescent bands of the galaxy's arms thrown across the heavens like the crashing of waves at night, when you’ve got your flashlight pointed out on the water at just the right angle.  Occasional stars falling across the sky, streaking tails behind them that color shifted through the whole spectrum, blue, green, yellow, orange, red. 

"I remember this," she said, breathless.  "This is something that never changes, something I don't think I could ever forget."

"It’s amazing."

"It’s more than amazing," she countered.  "Someday hopefully we'll be out there, moving around limitlessly, exploring, discovering.  Dreaming."