"We sit on the roof with hot butter tea and wait. Most nights, nothing happens. That is the point. Then, twice a year, something does."
Twice a year, the plateau's thin air and absolute dark make for some of the clearest meteor showers in the northern hemisphere. The Perseids in August, the Geminids in December. People in the cities pay money to fly to a desert to see what we can see from the roof of the house I borrow from, in pajamas, with a kettle.
The roof, the tea, the wait
The roof is flat. The view is unobstructed for a hundred and eighty degrees to the south and west. The horizon is the silhouette of a mountain ridge we don't have a name for — the one we just call "the back ridge" — and above it, on a clear night, the Milky Way runs vertically through the center of the sky, dense enough to throw a faint shadow.
I climb up around ten. My host mother follows with a thermos of butter tea and a small clay pot of tsampa. We do not use a phone. We do not use a flashlight. We sit on folded blankets, in the cold, and we look up. Most nights — even on the peak nights of a shower — nothing visible crosses for a long time. The wait is the point. You become very small under that sky. The wait is good for you.
The one that crossed
In the winter of my second year here, on the night of December 14th, we were about to give up. The temperature had dropped below −18, and my hands were numb around the cup. Then a streak — not the polite, hair-thin streak of an ordinary Perseid — a streak the width of a thumb, green at the head, white in the middle, and a long red ember-tail that took a full three seconds to fade. A bolide. A fireball.
It crossed from the east, over the back ridge, and disappeared into the southwest. My host mother made a small sound, half gasp and half laugh. I did not make a sound at all. We sat for a long time after. Then she said, in Tibetan, a phrase I won't translate here, but which roughly means: that one was for you.
Why the book is named this
I called my book Fireballs Over Manigango for a few reasons. The obvious one is the showers. The less obvious one is the people. Most of the people who have stayed in my life for any length of time came through briefly, brightly, and then kept moving — some to other parts of the plateau, some to cities, some out of touch entirely. They were like the meteors. They were here, and then they were a long red line in the dark, and then they were a memory.
I am not a fireball. I am the one still on the roof, holding the cold cup, watching the next one come. That is what the book is really about: not the people who crossed, but the one who didn't, and what that taught her about staying.
On the night of December 14th, my host mother did not say that one was for you because the meteor was beautiful. She said it because she had been watching me watch the sky for three years, and she knew I needed to see one close. I will not forget it. I do not think I am meant to.
