Northern Lights, Missoula, Montana. Photographer Brad Hutcheson

The one night I most wanted to be awake, I slept.

I slept through the ring of the phone, the old-fashioned kind, an alert of a sound.

I slept as he knocked on my door in an attempt to share the very skies with me.

One night in Missoula, he witnessed a celestial kaleidoscope.

I have the picture, and the memory of the play of life across his face as he told me

of what had passed overhead on the night I slept.