I stood on the roof and cried, tiny pinpricks of light filling my vision with their brilliance. The cosmos stretched above me, tall and brilliant, and I was so close to reaching it. I sneaked over to the ledge, glancing out over the entire surroundings and the nearby highway. One A.M. traffic was scarce, and as the last vehicle rounded the bend in the road, I breathed a deep breath in and let it out.

I was alone, with only God standing between me and the rest of the universe. My thoughts scattered in a myriad of directions, always coming back to reach the same emotion of wonder and awe.

Nearby, the Toyota American flag rippled wildly in the wind, the cool breeze stretching it beyond my own imaginings. How my fingers itched for a chance to catalog the momentous glory of the universe. I lifted my cell phone, always present, to the sky, pulling up the camera app with a single click. When I finally took the picture, the glory of the stars became a single brightened pixel in a sea of black. The dark wisps of clouds that drifted across the atmosphere were lost to poor optics, and I grunted in disapproval and disappointment. I hesitated for a moment, and reluctant to leave my hotel ceiling perch, a new idea came to me.

Four minutes later, I was back on the roof, a camera dangling from the strap around my neck. I lifted the device to the sky, allowing the camera to filter to the right lighting setting to capture the brilliance I saw before me. Yet, when I scrolled through the pictures, although significantly improved from the phone, they still did not stand a chance of capturing the brilliance I saw before me.

I paused, glancing between the camera roll and the sky above me. Another car zoomed its way across the highway, and I jumped, as if startled. I tried a couple of different shots, but the outlook was already the same. Eventually, I gave up, setting the camera aside, unsure of whether to be disappointed by my inability to photograph the sky, or disgusted that the thing that was so beautiful to me would not be beautiful to others.

I turned my attention back to the universe, the reason I had climbed the last bit from the fourth floor to the roof. I was not the first to come this far, as evidenced by the beer cans and other paraphernalia. But no one had been here in a long time either.

Wind rippled through my hair, and I sighed, breathing a deep breath in and out. The moon climbed high above my head, and the occasional pair of headlights split the darkness. Crickets chirped somewhere in the distance, and I realized in that moment, that I had tried to describe a myriad of emotions and sense in just a single picture. Of course it wouldn’t be as good.

I smiled, and the awe of minutes before returned, surprising me with its power. Who was I to seek to capture something like this?

Thus 1 am turned to 2 am, and soon I slipped back down to the fourth floor hotel room, confident I had paid my respects to the new day.