The sky had its lights on backwards

I'm standing in my garden with the old 8-inch dob, and every star I aim at turns out to be a streetlight seen through a different kind of dark — the constellations are just the town's glow mapped onto the dome. Venus is the floodlight at the gas station. The Milky Way is the motorway. I keep looking for one faint thing that's genuinely a star, and the scope keeps showing me sodium lamps and a few foxes walking across the eyepiece. I wake up, look out the window, and the real sky is still dim and familiar — and for once I'm relieved about the light pollution.