I Hear The Stars

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

They are wrong.

The very stars scream through lightyears of vacuum if you only know how to listen.

They call my sensory processing synesthesia; they call it a disorder.

What do they know?

I can hear the sounds of space in my sleep. Space calls to me, it haunts me. Humanity has been comfortably ensconced on our overly loud planet for millennia. Can no one else hear the sounds of space calling them further up, further in to the wonderful universe that waits at our fingertips?

I look up at night and hear a symphony of crystal-clear music that screams louder than the annoying cicadas that overwhelm my aural senses.

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, they say. But, I can’t wait to get up there and listen.

January – July 2021

At 5 lbs, 8 ounces, Julia Corona Jones was not a spectacular specimen of humanity. She wasn’t a premie but she was small. Her parents either had really bad “dad humor” or really didn’t see the irony of naming their quarantine baby Julia Corona.

What she was born with was a highly functional autistic brain that would serve humanity into the future but for now was just adequate to help her survive the next six months.

Even the greatest human starts from the most humble beginnings. Julia’s start was a simple color change. On the way home from the hospital, Erin Jones looked down in the car seat and saw this new life slowly turning purple.

That was the last time they rode in a car for months.

Coughing. Crying. Smiling. Cooing.

Communication does not have to be verbal to be meaningful and Julia’s brain began to process the world around her through many lenses.

Survival. Delight. Fear. Anticipation.

At 2 months old, she started responding positively to numbers. If Erin or Shane needed to get her to stop fussing while waiting for food, they could count.

Down from 30, up to 100, it did not matter. What mattered was the significance of the sequence of numbers. Julia’s brain was beginning to embrace the world around her and math was her first language.

At 3 months, Erin finally gave up trying to breastfeed Julia. Her doctor, lactation consultant, and midwife alike had helped her attempt to feed this new baby. Julia was only gaining weight because of the unique bottle feeding that Erin had learned and taught to Shane.

While a normal child’s brain is occupied with eating, sleeping, comfort, and learning, Julia seemed to absorb different lessons with amazing rapidity while she missed out on some of “the basics” of child development.

By 6 months, Julia was a healthy, developing infant.

Slightly more rambunctious than your average crawler but to all appearances she was normal.

Appearances can be deceiving.

Because hers was a brain that could hear stars scream.

August 2025

Erin and Shane Jones swung between amazement and frustration when dealing with this young life the universe had given them. 4 year-olds should not be able to read Mark Twain and solve multi-variate algebraic problems. On the other hand, 4-year-olds should also know that hitting their friends in the head with a stick was not proper social behavior.

Julia was not a normal 4-year-old.

Her development was light years ahead of the norm in some areas and remained in the stone age in others. Academics were a world of exploration; the local park was full of terror.

And her parents were both middling.

At 4 years old, Erin realized that no school would be able to handle the inquisitive, obtuse, focused, scatter brained, high functioning, low executive functioning conundrum that was her daughter.

So she opted for homeschooling, brought Julia to the community college library, and left her alone to explore.

When Julia raced through the library’s 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade math curricula in a week, Erin just borrowed more.

By the end of her 4th year of existence, the mind that could hear stars scream was both incredibly isolated by her intelligence and incredibly lonely.

She could understand how to use derivatives to calculate the area of an amorphous shape but she could not understand how to play with friends on a slide or how to communicate with her mother.

So she looked to the stars.

It was a late summer night, when all the rest of the state was gearing up for the start of school, that Julia looked up and first heard the sounds of the through the bright swath of light we call the milky way.

While rampaging away from her parents and dreaded bedtime, she looked up.

The world of overwhelming noise, lights, smells, and touch came to a crashing stand still.

And she heard the symphony. She felt the stars calling to her.

And she realized that humanity is not alone. The very stars call out to us, if only we could reach out to them.

And thus humanity’s leap to the stars started.

Not in a laboratory. Not in the mind of a billionaire. Not in the hopes and dreams of presidents and prime ministers.

In the mind of a small child who did not quite belong.

Humanity found our place in the stars, we just would not know it for a few more years.