From my balcony in Athens, on a good November night, I can count perhaps a dozen stars.

I used to think that was the sky. This month, three of us packed coffee and blankets into the car on a whim, drove two hours into the Peloponnese, parked on a dirt road with no lights in any direction, and stepped out under three thousand.

The gasp is involuntary. Everyone does it, even the friend who came only for the road trip and stayed in the car until curiosity beat the cold. Three thousand stars, the Milky Way itself poured across the middle of the sky like spilled sugar, so bright it casts a kind of anti-shadow in your attention. And the strange, almost embarrassing realization, standing there: none of this was ever gone. This exact sky hangs over my balcony every single night. Over the traffic, over the bars, over my dozen miserable stars. All of it, present, every night of my life.

The city does not turn the stars off. It turns the floor lights up.

The mechanism deserves one paragraph, because it is so simple it hurts. Starlight is faint, ancient, and utterly steady. City light is loud, new, and everywhere, billboards, headlights, a hundred thousand well-meant porch bulbs, all of it scattering off the air itself and filling the sky with a dull glowing ceiling. The stars still arrive, their photons land on Athens exactly as they land on the Peloponnese, having crossed centuries to get there. They are simply outshone at the last meter. Astronomers do not fix this with bigger telescopes pointed harder. They fix it the only way it can be fixed: they go where the noise is not. Every great observatory on Earth is a monument to subtraction, built on some dark mountain far from everything, not to get closer to the stars, the distance is a rounding error, but to get away from us.

We stayed three hours. Made the coffee on the tailgate. My friend who came for the road trip found the Pleiades with the binoculars and would not surrender them.

And on the drive home, headlights eating the dark road, I finally said out loud the thing the whole night had been spelling. I have been doing quiet mornings for two years now, sitting still before the day starts, and people ask me sometimes, gently, skeptically, what I am trying to achieve in there, what I am adding. And I have struggled to answer, because the honest answer is nothing. I am not adding anything. Nothing needs to be added. Whatever is good in a person, the warmth, the clarity, the three thousand stars of them, is already arriving, every night, constantly, having crossed years to get there. It is simply outshone. By the feeds, the deadlines, the replaying of old arguments, the hundred thousand well-meant bulbs of a busy mind.

You do not build a better sky. You drive out from under the glow, and the sky that was always there does the rest.

Ten minutes of dark mountain, most mornings, before the city switches on. That is the whole practice. The stars, I can now report from field observation, have been there the entire time.