I was underneath the navy sky adorned in stars and constellations which I didn’t know the names of when I first tilted my head back. It was my first night in my new apartment in my new city in my new country and I desperately craved something familiar, so I looked up at the same moon I knew my family would see hours later, back at home.
For the next three months, I repeated these motions: sitting on the terrace, chin lifted, eyes firm on the night sky. I became so familiar with the Florentine sky until the newness didn't intimidate me anymore, and the city became my reprieve. Each day started with the brightness of the sun and ended with tracing invisible lines between the stars.
Some nights, my new roommates joined me. They were able to point out constellations and give me new paths for my tracings until every night, the first thing I looked for in the sky was Orion's Belt. This was one of the easiest constellations to see all over the world, they had told me, knowing this nighttime routine was born out of a search for familiarity.
Ironically, the meaning behind Orion's Belt is anything but familiar, and different cultures have different interpretations of its' symbolism. According to some, Ancient Indians saw the constellation as a king who had been shot by an arrow; Ancient Egyptians thought the stars in the belt represented the resting place of the soul of the god Osiris; Western culture believed the three stars to be a biblical reference to the Three Kings.
But for months, Orion's Belt was my only familiar in my new apartment in my new city in my new country. My first night back home in Philadelphia, I almost subconsciously found myself outside at night, attempting to look past the light pollution and skyscrapers busying the sky to find Orion's Belt.
It was in a different spot in the sky and a little harder to make out, but it was there.
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