Venus Supremus

The distance between the moon and Venus is always important to me. Some nights Venus is so close it looks like a belly button piercing. Sometimes it’s far away, and hides under the horizon. Of course, no matter how they look in the sky, they’ll always be trillions of miles away from each other—or some other inconceivably large number that will make absolutely no sense when rattled off to a lay person just because they’re being guided around the Adler Planetarium. Sometimes the moon will swell, threatening and large, bruised he same shade of orange as Halloween pumpkins; a visual trick caused by the diffraction of the molecules that make up air. Whenever the moon decides to expand, it eclipses Venus, and no matter how hard one tries, no one can find her. Or maybe that’s due to the sense of apocalypse one feels, wondering why now, the moon, small like a dime and shiny like polished platinum, is now glaring red and dangerously close to the horizon line. Can the moon crash into the earth? It should be possible, you assume, but you don’t really know. No one else you walk past seems to worry about it like you do, so maybe you’re just going crazy. Maybe the moon is just jealous. Maybe it was tired of always looking exactly the same, appearing in the same general place, night after night. Yea sure, it wanes, it waxes, but after a while, even ancient peoples understood its behavior so completely they were setting up mathematical equations to find out when it would eclipse the sun, another example of contemptuous behavior.
But Venus. Now there’s a little more surprise. It’s 22 times bigger than the moon, but from the vantage point of earth it’s a speck; a bright speck, the brightest speck in the sky. But it’s still just a little dot. Even though it’s a planet, almost the size of earth, it still carries a common name around with it: the evening star.