Whenever I think of the day I promised to love you forever, I think of the night we saw the deer and the stars become one.

The cool November air touched the surface of the warm pool, creating the dense landscape of steam we swam through. Alone in the dark, our moonlit bodies floated toward the glass wall at the edge of the water. As our eyes adjusted to the expanse of the night, the sky filled with stars, but so too did the land before us. Bright luminescing orbs began to appear in the field as hundreds of deer eyes met our distant porch light. Flickering in and out of existence as they grazed, their eyes perforated the darkness like an earthly stream of stars. As time passed, the terrestrial and celestial stars seemed to merge, creating a continuous constellation of twinkling light bodies in the night.

When we let the quiet of the moment hold us and direct our gaze upwards, the stars began to fall. Again and again and again; they shot across the sky with blazing tails tracing their paths. And then we heard them. Long dry sizzles that broke the spell of the night as we realized we were witnessing the sounds that stars make when they touch our atmosphere.

We sat in this place of wonder where deer became stars and stars became deer, where the silent sky became alive with sounds we never knew existed, and we fell more in love with the world than ever before.