When I was sixteen, I saw the Milky Way for the first time.

I was six months old when I was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa. I'm lucky, the type that I have is not the most vicious or devastating.  It means that I'm night blind, that my peripheral vision is slowly narrowing into a pinhole, and that my depth perception is gradually flattening away to nothing.

My cousins and I used to go out and lie on sleeping bags in the back of a pickup truck and watch meteor showers.  They would watch. I would stare up into the black sky and study the seven bright points of light that I could see, and wonder what it was like.

Then, my dad.  My father ordered a pair of Russian night vision goggles from a military surplus catalog.  He said he wanted to walk his sprinklers at night and make sure they didn't get plugged by debris in the irrigation water.  But he also knew what a gift it would be for me.  When the package arrived, I spent the day reading the instructions over and over again, waiting for night to fall.  Then finally, the sun went down, dad turned off our yard light, and we went outside.

I put on the goggles, removed the lens caps, and looked up into the sky.  It was a personal miracle.  Stretching above me in uncountable points of light as far as I could see, there were stars, some of them clustered so tightly together they made swirling patterns of white against the inky darkness.  I stared.

I'd had people describing the stars to me all my life, and what I had come to realize was that everyone tells you something different, because they all see them in their own way.  But none of what they had tried to describe to me could possibly match the glittering arch of that night sky.

I still wasn't seeing what others would have. Even with the assistance of night vision goggles, there would be stars too dim for my eyes to perceive. Then too, there was the matter of that green wash of color over everything. It didn't matter. I was breathless under an arm of the Milky Way that I had always simply had to take on faith was even there.

Two weeks later, someone broke into my father's pickup and stole the night vision goggles from behind the seat. They smashed the driver's side window in and ran. What hurt the most was knowing that, to those cowards, it was just easy cash. A quick, dirty transaction to a faceless man behind a counter at a pawn shop miles away. It meant less than nothing to them.

There was no way for us to order new ones, first of all because they had been so expensive, and, more to the point, as a military surplus item, there was only a very limited supply of them.  When we realized that, I went into my room, curled on my side with a book, and pretended to read while I let my heart break around the loss of so much ordinary magic.

When I got to college, I followed my nature, which is to study the things that I don't understand.  It never takes away the mystery.  After consulting with the instructor and explaining my night vision issues, he agreed to let me take astronomy.

There, what I had thought would be a liability turned out to be an asset in the class.  Without all the clutter, I could find the visible planets and the stars we used for markers more quickly and easily than anyone else, including our professor.  I loved the learning process. But it was sad too. I still had to simply believe without seeing. A telescope doesn't gather enough light for my eyes.  

When I was sixteen years old, my father gave me the stars, handed them to me in the emerald green trappings of infrared.  Since they were stolen, sometimes I wish I'd never seen them at all.  You can't miss what you've never had, and the memories of what you've lost can be devastating.  But mostly, I try to be grateful for the brief taste I got.  At least I know what's out there.  I've seen it for myself. 

My revision of roswellgray's excellent piece of autobiographical story-telling for the SPACE theme.  Mostly I was just tightening things, coming at it from the point of view of a spoken performance.  However, I did add three sentences at the end, drawing from my own feelings about losing something dear to me.  @Roswellgray, I hope those last few lines resonate with you, but if they don't for any reason, let's absolutely change them.