It’s not that I've refused to acknowledge what science says — that stars are big burning balls of gas, some burning millions of light years away. Yes, stars are things. They don’t have morals or agendas, and I should refrain from personifying them in scientific settings — but what if? What if they are more than just things? What if they did acknowledge us and could take on different forms to walk among us? What if there are versions of them here, on Earth, trying to tell us a deep secret about the distant ones in space?

So far, communication with stars has been fairly one-way; that is, we humans project our thoughts, hopes, and suspicions upon them. The stars carry on undisturbed. But instead of waiting for them to learn human language, we've gotten good at examining starlight and its interactions with extraterrestrial materials, so much so that scientists can infer the chemical composition of a celestial body that we may not meet in person for eons to come.

In the days of yore, we interpreted starlight in a simpler way. Some imaginative fellows decided that their formations sketched out characters from stories — but I’ll never be able to fathom how most of those characterizations caught on. Randall Munroe had it right: Orion has a dong, not a sword, and I’d prove it to you in person if I ever find the rest of his body. But gaze as I might, the strings of light above me always fail to form a cohesive message.

This old, familiar frustration inevitably leads me back to the first time I saw how we humans also formed burning cords of light.

Over a decade later from that first flight, I would find myself in a computer lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, intrigued by maps of fruit fly neurons obtained by tagging specific genes with radioactive labels. They reminded me of other neuronal maps I had seen that resembled city lights from above at night. I couldn't shake the thought that stars were buried in our very genetics, ordering us into the same patterns as the galaxies.

Well, we’re made of starstuff, aren’t we? The idea evokes the poetic notion that we are drawn to the stars because they’re in our very blood.

Even if you excise every scrap of sentimental narrative, most of us will agree that stars and meteorites probably seeded our fertile egg of a planet with crucial minerals and precious metals. Then we evolved under the sun, learned to love it, ended up needing it. In the darkest of places or times, we are instinctively drawn to spots of light, no matter how small they may seem or how they much they may flicker.

To be clear, I didn't fear the fireflies, the same way I don’t fear most lights in the dark. But I still wonder what stars may truly be like behind the fanciful or sensible stories we tell ourselves. All possibilities are considered.

This past summer, five college friends and I spent a weekend in Rohrersville, Maryland at a hobbit hole. As the newest addition to a campground that mostly featured treehouses, the hobbit hole wasn't quite finished: the grass hadn't completely grown over the roof, and the front yard was strewn with gravel, loose bark, and wood chips. This splintery carpet made walking barefoot inconvenient, but we didn't really mind—though we did stay clear of one particularly thick patch where a giant wolf spider lived.

We avoided it more out of respect than fear. Early one morning, we had watched it catch, kill, and laboriously drag a butterfly deep into its den. I couldn't but help think that we were in Mirkwood, surrounded by the children of the great Shelob herself.

When night fell, we gathered around the campfire. Our conversations rose and split and fell, wandering to and fro and gaining fevered tones. The night air was cool, and the waxing gibbous moon watched us reel to the thoughts and emotions that spun our lives together.

Late in the night, the fire began burning low. The least inebriated of us went into the woods with a headlamp to retrieve some suitable fuel. On his third excursion, he returned with strange smile on his face. He came up to me and tapped at the blinding Cyclops eye strapped to his forehead.

“I kept seeing these little lights, like green diamonds in the dirt,” he said. “It was absolutely horrifying when I realized what they are.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“Spider eyes,” he said.

I scrambled for my own headlamp. He gestured for me to crouch away from the fire and slanted his arm to approximate an angle that skimmed the surface of the ground.

“It helps if you move your head up and down,” he said. “And your headlamp has to be right above your eyes.”

I bobbed my head, and hundreds of small green lights pricked up from the surrounding debris, almost one for every few inches of ground. The sheer number and density of them made me gasp. Most were still, constant beacons; a few winked in and out. I picked one out and approached it, noting that there were fat daddy longlegs scurrying by with nary a glimmer. But true to my friend’s prediction, my targeted gem was a diamond-eyed wolf spider, tiny and fearless, unfazed by my proximity.

“The scariest part of all this,” my friend remarked, “Is that we’re only seeing the ones that are looking directly back at us.”

I became terribly aware of the ground beneath my thin flip-flops and glanced down to catch a few wolf spiders striding away with heavy white egg sacs on their backs. As I watched them retreat back into the darkness, I pictured that the night sky was filled with Shelob-sized wolf spiders, tucked behind meteorites and other space debris, their motionless eyes reflecting the light of our one real sun — watching.