Chris stood in the middle of the street. His neck began to ache, but he kept a close watch of the night sky above him. It was cold and everything seemed to crack under the pressure of a forgotten season. Winter had come as a surprise, and the dangling freshness of green leaves quickly turned into a dreary gray with nude trees.

July 20, 1969. The date ran through Chris’ mind as he noticed a faint ball of light moving through the frozen stars. He wasn’t born yet on that day, but he’d heard plenty of stories from his family members.

“I’d never felt so inspired as when I saw Apollo 11 shoot past the last cloud I could spot,” Grandpa Jorge told him one day while watching Saturday morning cartoons. “You could feel the happiness flow through the country like a strong wind, and later, nothing seemed more beautiful than the first steps taken on the moon.”

Chris tried to live through the stories he heard. He’d close his eyes and try to picture looking at a blue sky with a silver dot that carried more importance than anything else up there. He pictured sitting on a soft carpet, like his mother did one day, looking at an ancient TV and hearing the countdown to a future of vast possibilities.

He turned toward the moon. It was full and looked so close there seemed to be a faint possibility of climbing the tallest building in the country and touching it with your fingers. Chris pictured his hands grazing the bumpy texture and the soft gray sand attaching itself to his skin. It sent a gratifying feeling, like an electrical charge, through his body. Then he thought of Neil Armstrong’s footsteps, forever marked onto the moon and in history. The footsteps were always the thing that people thought about when hearing Apollo 11 or his name, as if they were also taken on the minds of people.

Suddenly, Chris’ body jerked and a memory crashed into the barriers of his mind. It was a memory that occasionally appeared when his dreams flew too high and crash landed from a realization of its unattainability.

July 20, 2010. The date pounded through his whole body. He pushed his eyelids together, clenched his fists and held himself tight, but it got into his head either way.

It was a hot Tuesday and school was out. Chris remembered he’d spent the whole morning playing video games in his room, waiting for the sun to set and for the day to cool down. Looking back, Chris remembered feeling a bit anxious; he’d constantly rolled around his bed, fidgeted with the controller, and continually rearranged his bed. Then the memory fast-forwarded to late afternoon. Both of his parents were home, which meant he could go out. Chris and his friends had planned a trip to the community pool, and they all gathered at the corner of Chris’ street and speed walked there. It took them about 30 minutes and they had all worked up a sweat.

Chris shivered as the memory made its way toward the end.

After a couple hours, they’d decided it was time to go. The sun was already hidden behind the mountains in the horizon and there was only a small tint of orange left in the sky. Because it had gotten so late, one of Chris’ friends called his brother to pick them up. The brother had just gotten his driver’s license and was almost too willing to drive.

It was when they had begun to make their way through an intersection that a burst of screaming cut through Chris, turning his eyes toward the truck that came rampantly past its stop sign, heading toward the side he sat on. The rest comes in fragments. He faintly remembers his friend pulling him by the arm, away from the window, and then a heavy blanket of black falling over him. And finally, hearing his parents cry, something that continues to squeeze his stomach and fill him with nausea.

Soon the memory left him, and Chris slowly let go of his body. Everything ached except his lower half, which made his nausea turn into complete and utter anger. He slammed the arm rests on his sides and a deep howl pushed out of his throat and dissipated into the night air. He started crying from desperation as he remembered Ray Bradbury’s poem, “If Only We Had Taller Been.”

“It was a place half in the sky where, in the green of leaf and the promising of peach, we’d reach our hand to touch, and almost touch the sky. If we could reach and touch, we said, it would teach us not to, never to, be dead.”

Chris repeated the lines in his head and finally wiping his tears, gave the sky one last look. Then releasing the break on his wheelchair, made his way back into the house.