Age of Starlight

Lauren Olamina starts writing the verses of Earthseed: The Book of the Living on July 20, 2024. She is fifteen years old, and her walled neighborhood is a weak excuse for safety outside of Los Angeles, where water shortages, poverty, and gang violence stoke a continually raging fire. 

When she tries to be her father's daughter, she dreams she is teaching herself to fly. From inside her home, she floats, bumping against the walls and door jambs like a pinball on its journey to the next level. When she finally sees open sky, however, she is caught by inescapable flames that swallow her whole. 

Then, darkness.

From darkness, shine the stars, Lauren says of the second part of her dream.

Speaking of stars:

• At thirteen, my brother took my cousins and me down a road that led to ocean-side cliffs for the first time. After walking along the path between empty lots, we sat on a sandy ledge and took in the eastern view of the Cape Cod Bay. Then we leapt, and powdery sand braced our fall as we zigzagged down 175 feet, digging our feet into the cliff one jump at a time to the soggy beach below. Electric lights dotted the coastline, but the wide-open world glistened from the starlight above.
  
  
• At twenty-one, I had just returned from a semester abroad. Toward the end of a reunion with old friends, I sought quiet on the lawn of the off-campus farmhouse. Ninety minutes outside of any city, the night sky was dark except for the bright stars and a full moon. In the previous six months, I took flight from my childhood home, but at that moment, I lay on firm, cold ground one summer night. With burning questions about who I was and what I was meant to be, I called on the stars for advice.
  
  
• At forty-nine, I was in Northern California, studying Parable of the Sower with about 25 other people. Our world was growing all too similar to the science-fictional one Octavia Butler described. By day, we read, journaled, and talked, when we weren't stepping over rocks in the creek or spotting pollywogs. One night, I walked to the edge of campus where the outline of Sonoma Mountain showed through the moonlight. Reflecting on being a teacher for over twenty years by then, a wife and a mother for 26, I understood that intermittent flames changed me year by year. Meanwhile, the long life of the stars lit the path before me.