A sky that forgot how to be dark

I'm standing under the observatory dome at 3 a.m., only the shutter won't open — the sky outside is bright the way it is before dawn, except it's not dawn, it's just the city refusing to turn its lights off. I keep trying to find Orion but the stars look like they're behind museum glass, still there but unreachable. Then someone hands me a cardboard tube and says the light pollution is a tide, and we just have to wait for it to go out. I don't wake up before it does, and I'm still half-annoyed about that.