Day twelve!  An attempt at describing watching the comet Hale-Bopp when I was ten and space-obsessed. Doesn't really convey what I was trying to, but enough there to rework at some point :)

Hale-Bopp,  1997

I liked the stars because of maths.
Year 5 times tables challenge won
a book of constellations- all stickers
and glow-in-the-dark pictures and myth-
and I was obsessed.  Science and stories,
fiction and facts fused with wonder.
The book stayed in my schoolbag till Year 9,
long after I knew it by heart, tracing
Braille-like stars with nervous fingertips.

Homework was less scary against
a backdrop of darkness and infinity.
It's amazing what a ten-year-old
can absorb, swallowing information
with the intensity of black hole gravity,
freaking out to Bowie's Space Oddity.
Even as an adult, the song still spins
my head with nauseous vertigo.

We watched the comet through the gap
of curtains in my parents' darkened bedroom.
Lights out and shadowed, I stared at
the fuzz of two and a half thousand years.
Leaning out the window, I breathed in
the wonder of millenia, willing my
stardust cells to merge with comet magic.
I could sense Bowie's Starman waiting
in the sky.  Now, years later, I still
feel the vertigo of infinity, the sense
of everything and nothing at once,
your own contingence in the universe.
In the scheme of the cosmos,
you hardly even exist.