I was maybe four years old, strapped into the backseat of my parents’ car, my cheek pressed against the cold window glass, when I first noticed it: the moon was chasing us. Not drifting casually along, but urgently, purposefully, leaping over rooftops and telephone wires, skimming the dark tree line just to keep me in its sight. I tested it—I ducked below the window, counted to ten, and popped back up. There it was, slightly shifted but still fixed on me, as if it had been holding its breath waiting for my return. The logic was irrefutable. The moon loved me, followed me, needed me in order to know where to go.
This was not a whimsical fantasy I spun for comfort; it was empirical truth derived from careful observation. The moon’s behavior was consistent, night after night, car ride after car ride. I reasoned that if I turned the corner and the moon turned with me, then I must be the center of its orbit. My parents laughed and offered explanations about parallax and relative distance, about how the moon is so far away that it appears stationary while near objects stream past. But their words were air. I had eyes. I knew what I saw. The universe, I had discovered, was profoundly personal. It had a face, and that face was turned exclusively toward me.
Now, decades later, I can hardly grasp the architecture of that belief. It seems ridiculous, almost embarrassing, that I ever inhabited a mental world so brazenly self-centered. The adult in me scoffs: How could you not see that the moon is 239,000 miles away, indifferent and inert, a dead rock locked in a gravitational covenant with the entire planet, not with a single child in a sedan? The very notion is a monument to cognitive error, a textbook case of childhood egocentrism so pure it could be printed in a psychology primer. And yet, when I push past the ridicule, I find something tender lodged there, something I mourn.
The ridiculousness of the belief lies precisely in its violation of perspective. To believe the moon followed me, I had to be incapable of understanding that other people exist with equal vividness, that my gaze was not the organizing principle of reality. It required a kind of radical innocence—the world was not a shared stage but a private performance. That innocence is what falls away as we grow, replaced by the relentless adult knowledge that we are one consciousness among billions, that the cosmos is not only indifferent but also staggeringly vast, and that our personal narrative is a flicker of static in a broadcast we will never fully hear. Learning parallax is not just a geometry lesson; it is an expulsion from the garden. You trade a magical, responsive universe for a mechanical one, and the exchange rate is never in your favor.
What I find myself contemplating now is not the absurdity of the belief but the elegance of its internal logic. For a child, the most reasonable explanation is the one that accounts for her own experience. If the moon stays in your window while houses and trees flee backward, what are you supposed to conclude? That you are moving, yes, but how much more sensible it is to conclude that the largest and most luminous object in the night sky has taken an interest in you. You feel important; the universe confirms it. This is not a failure of intelligence but a different kind of intelligence, one that organizes data around meaning rather than mechanics. The adult mind dismisses it as ridiculous because we have learned to value accuracy over significance, to prize the impersonal truth over the resonant story.
And is that always a triumph? I think about how much of adult life is an effort to recapture that sense of being personally addressed by existence—through love, through ambition, through religion or art or the desperate hope that we are seen. We spend years trying to feel that something vast and luminous is following us, witnessing us. The child simply knew it without having to try. Her error was not in desiring a meaningful cosmos but in not yet being broken enough to doubt it.
Sometimes, on long drives through empty country roads, I find myself slipping back into the old illusion. The moon hangs steady over a distant barn, and for a breath, I am the still center again. The ridiculous belief flickers back, and I do not correct it immediately. I let it shimmer there, a ghost of the self I used to be, the one who had not yet learned to be small. I realize that growing up is not just a process of accumulating knowledge but of consenting to a series of diminishing returns. We gain the truth, and we lose the feeling that the truth is about us.
In the end, the belief that the moon followed me is ridiculous only from the outside. From the inside, it was a radiant fact, as real as love or fear or any of the invisible structures we build to make life habitable. I cannot return to it, but I can see it for what it was: a first, flawed draft at understanding connection, a way of placing myself in relationship with the infinite. The moon, as it happens, does not follow anyone. But for a little while, I was lucky enough to believe that the universe knew my name. And there is a part of me, perhaps the most honest part, that still wonders if the real ridiculousness lies not in the believing but in how easily we let it go.
Bhyllabus l'énigme 
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