In my office, I’ve stuck a few dozen glow-in-the-dark stars on the walls. It’s silly because during the day, I can’t see them. Well, I can if I look for them, but they’re easy to miss. And I don’t sit in my office in the dark. Weird, huh?
So I see the stars only at the end of the day when I turn out the light to go to bed. For a moment I see the glowing stars, then I shut the door. But that brief moment of fake starlight always makes me happy.
Years ago in one of the first apartments my husband and I lived in, I put glow-in-dark stars on the ceiling of the bedroom. If you’ve ever looked at packages of these things, you know that there are different kinds. The ones I have now are a thick hard plastic. They’re endlessly reusable. The ones I had back in that early apartment were more like stickers, more challenging to remove and not really reusable. And I had put a lot of them on the ceiling. But again, during the day, not obviously visible. So, when we moved out, I left them up there.
The apartment manager never contacted me about having to remove them, so I assumed they stayed there and surprised the next tenants. I like to imagine that first night sleeping in the apartment, after a long day of hauling boxes in the Texas heat, they turned out the light and realized they were sleeping under stars.
Perhaps they were charmed. Perhaps annoyed. I guess not everyone wants glow-in-the-dark stars. But I’m going to believe they stayed up there until a few years later when the apartment complex was remodeled, and they made somebody happy.
When I was about ten or eleven, by step-sister and I had these glow-in-the-dark skeletons. They must’ve been about four inches tall. We played with them when we were supposed to be asleep. For a while we shared a room, sleeping in the same queen-sized bed. So we’d put the glowing skeletons between us and whispered made-up stories. We’d often get yelled at eventually because one of us would laugh or get angry and talk too loud.
Why is glow-in-the-dark so appealing? Phosphorescence and bioluminescence are beguiling. Magical. Dreamlike. Glowworms and jellyfish and deep-sea creatures. Sure, you can have the glowing eyes of demons or shining figures of ghosts, which scare or unsettle. But mostly they enchant–like the silvery moon in the night sky. Like crows, we like shiny things.
Curious about why humans actually like shiny, glowing things, I googled. (Emphasis mine.)
…we present our theorizing to explain that people’s preference for glossy is innate and stems from the human need for fresh water as a resource. We present a series of six studies in which we demonstrate the preference for glossy among both adults and young children … ruling out socialization as the explanation underlying the preference for glossy, investigate the hypothesis that the preference for glossy stems from an innate preference for water as a resource … and rule out the more superficial account of glossy = pretty ….
Hmm. Glossy and glowing aren’t exactly the same, but as far as a river winding its way through a dark forest, they are.
How ironic we ruin the water in our pursuit of shiny things.
Oh well. I’ll still love stars whether in the sky or in my office, even if I see them for only a moment in time.
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Thanks for reading!
Marta Bacon 