It was when I was five and my family lived in the tiny half-dilapidated apartment. In the tiny kitchen of the tiny apartment, there was a wooden dining table where we used to eat all our meals and snacks. Though it was a very basic plain table with four legs, it was the first table I consciously saw in my life, and as such, I was very fond of it and fascinated by it.
One day, I was sitting under the table exploring it from beneath when I found two dots of white paints on the brown wooden surface. The dots were blurred on one side, creating tails.
“Shooting stars!” I cried. “We have shooting stars here!”
I immediately called my little brother to show him my discovery. He also got excited, and we both traced the tails with our fingers.
From that day on, watching shooting stars became our daily routine. Every evening, after dinner, when my mother was washing the dishes, I would say to my brother “Let’s go and watch the shooting stars!” and we would crawl under the table and look up.
“There goes a shooting star!”
“Oh, another one!”
It as a most predictable, and yet most exciting star gazing trip. Neither of us had seen a real shooting star before. As I looked up at the two shooting stars every night under the kitchen table, I would think to myself if this was how a real shooting star might look like in the sky.