My name is Harper and in six months I am going to die.

I know this because I paid for the privilege. You can do testing for anything nowadays, and apparently your expiration date is one of them.

I had money to spare, I was bored, and yes, I foolishly thought the test would tell me some distant faraway age like eighty-two or maybe even one hundred and two. When I found out my expiry date was in six months, I began to have a really, really bad case of buyer’s remorse.

I went through quite a lengthy denial period, where I thought I could go through the rest of my life pretending that if I just do things exactly the same way and not change anything I would conveniently forget and everything would be fine and dandy. (This was by far my favorite coping mechanism. But it didn’t last. Eventually my anxiety bubbled up and exploded like a shaken champagne bottle.)

Next came an obsessive, defiant, planning phase. Everyday I would think of elaborate plans to avoid death like I could somehow scheme my way out of it. I mean, theoretically, it seems doable. Plane crash? Don’t go on a plane. Car accident? Just stay home all week. Heck, heart attack? Pop three baby aspirins and hang out in the hospital lobby, right next to the crash cart ready to wave a big sign that says “I’m having a heart attack.” Unfortunately the test didn’t provide the cause of death, just the exact time, so I couldn’t really plan in specifics.

Eventually all the planning became incredibly exhausting and I settled into a kind of defeated acceptance. My plan was still not to actively put myself in a situation where I could die, I was not quite ready to submit to my annihilation, but if I somehow still find myself in that situation anyway, I figured I should really work on trying to be okay with that.

So then I commenced on a hedonistic three months where I blew half of my life savings and did literally anything I could think of. I ziplined through the forests of Peru, skydived over the French countryside, drank the best wines and indulged in rich Italian food, snorkeled off the shores of Bali, shopped with abandon while perusing the streets of Tokyo, London, Dubai…

You get the idea.

The most pathetic part of this whole thing was that I didn’t have a family to spend my last few days with. Or close friends, really. My impending death would not be filled with earnest mourning and last minute tearful proclamations of love and reminiscing. Oh sure, my funeral would be packed, but nobody would miss me, not really. As an orphaned twenty-two year old who inherited too much money at an early age, not only was I kind of an entitled asshole, I also haven’t really lived yet. I haven’t fallen in love or had kids, wrote that great American novel, won a Pulitzer, or experienced any of that syrupy sweet stuff life is supposedly made of.

Anyway, that’s why I’m hanging out in the hospice ward.

My friend here is Lucas. He is twenty-nine and has end stage heart failure from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. He described it as his heart being too big - literally but I suspect it's also an accurate description of him figuratively. I befriended him five months ago when I found out I was going to die. And no, surprisingly, he does not have any wisdom to impart about acceptance and healing and the meaning of life. He is very not okay with his young, awesome life being cut short, thank you very much.

He did have some useful information for me though.

“It’s quite experimental.” Lucas warned in an ominous tone.

“Obviously.”

“They usually only accept terminal patients… you know, because of the ethical issues.” He eyed me warily. “But in your case, they made an exception.”

He was adorable. He said that last line like a late night infomercial. Or maybe a used car salesman.

“This is not some elaborate black market scam to harvest my organs, is it?” I raise an eyebrow at him. “I mean, no offense, but you look like you could use a new heart.”

Lucas had to grab his oxygen mask after laughing so hard at that one. The nurse at the station gave me a dirty look.

After Lucas recovered he looked me in the eye. “How much do you have left?”

“Time? Or money?” I joked. The look on his face was not amused. I cleared my throat. “One month. And as you know, money is not an object.”

“Well, one month can give you… at least eighty years in virtual time. So pretty much a whole lifetime, if you decide on it.” Lucas shrugged. “Once you jack in though, there’s no going back. Your clock will end as scheduled and that’s the only way out. Also, it’s totally immersive, so you won’t even know you’re in virtual. It will be like… you’re in a dream but you don’t know you’re in a dream.”

“So I would really believe everything was real? Like I would grow up to be ninety years old and I would actually think I lived all those years even though really it will only be one month?”

“Mostly, yes.”

“How many of the other people will be real?”

“Most will be computer generated. You might meet some real ones, if they are in the same time dilation settings as you. There are very few people with the resources for a whole month, you know. Most people can only afford one day.”

“So there’s a chance that I will marry a program?” I furrowed my brows. “And then if we have kids, they will also be programs?”

Lucas cocked an eyebrow. “There’s a high chance, statistically. Like I said, there’s only a few real participants at any given time. Not that it would matter to you, you won’t know the difference.”

I thought about this. Would it really bother me if I didn’t know? I bet my computer generated kids would be adorable.

His expression suddenly turned serious. “There’s something else. It’s rare, but there are a few cases of people noticing little things not quite right and they become increasingly convinced they’re in a simulation. Which of course is true, but when you’re jacked in and you’re not completely sure if you’re crazy or just being paranoid, it can be terrifying. They call it Simulation Induced Paranoia, or SIP.” He paused. “Participants become really…. distressed.”

I chewed on this for a second. “I still want to do it.”

He looked surprised. “Really?”

“I really don’t have anything to lose.” I replied nonchalantly, like I just decided on a dinner entree. I should probably be alarmed that I was acting so cavalier. Lucas wasn’t exactly giving a stellar sales pitch. Then again, it was true, I really had nothing left to lose. I’ve done what I could with my twenty-two years. Might as well have another lifetime to try again.

Lucas stared at me for a moment then sighed. “That’s the thing. The longer you’re in virtual, the higher the chance you might experience SIP. Remember, Harper, a month is a lifetime. The chances are very low of course - less than 1%, the virtual worlds are very meticulously programmed after all. But if you experience SIP, there’s no cure, no safe word, you’re stuck until your clock runs out.”

“I already decided.” I said resolutely. Once I’ve made up my mind on something I was usually unshakable. It was one of my many flaws. “In fact, let’s do it tonight. I want to get my whole lifetime, not a year less.”

—

Everything was too bright, the sounds too loud. I wanted to scream but I couldn’t. Jacking in was a very jarring process, it felt as if all my neurons were firing up all at once. Somehow I felt tremendous pain and the heights of delirious ecstasy simultaneously. Like I was feeling every possible thing all at the same time. There was a terrifying moment when everything went black, and for what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few seconds, I truly wholeheartedly believed I was actively dying.

Maybe I was supposed to die on the table during the procedure. Or maybe I really did unwittingly offer to have my organs harvested for the black market. Damn it, I probably caused my own death in my extreme efforts to avoid it...

I blinked twice. The room slowly came into focus.

“Hey, sleeping beauty.” A familiar voice.

It was Lucas. But also, it was not Lucas. He did not have his portable oxygen tank close by. His lips did not have their usual bluish tint. He looked… healthy.

Everything came back to me at once.

“Oh shit, Lucas. That was nuts.” I shook my head, clearing the cobwebs. “That felt too real. I really felt like I was in there for twenty-two years.” I checked my watch. I’ve only been in Virtual for twenty-two minutes.

He chuckled, swiveling back and forth on the expensive office chair I bought him for Christmas last year. My boyfriend never could sit still. “You’re a champ, Harper, you were the one who wanted to push the time dilation to a year per minute. I was worried pushing it that far would compromise the world building, but your mind was amazing at meeting the program halfway to fill in the gaps. You made yourself a rich orphan, really? Money is no object? Hah!”

I disconnected my neurojack from the surgically implanted access port behind my right ear. That rich orphan stuff was my subconscious free at the wheel. I didn’t intentionally decide on it. I turned back to Lucas. “Why did you add all that stuff about Virtual in there, and SIP? Don’t you think that was a little too… meta?”

Lucas suddenly broke into that grin that melted my heart so many years ago when we met during undergrad at MIT. “Well, since you wanted to put the expiry dates into the program so people would know how much time they had left, I thought, what the heck, why not make it interesting? Why not make a virtual game in Virtual?”

I was not amused. Lucas had a penchant for bloated code and unnecessary side doors. Also, for not telling me about an adjustment until after he has done it. “That’s messed up. You should have run that by me. The expiry date was a suggestion from the beta testers and we all agreed on it. We didn’t agree on putting the game into the Virtual Universe as a side door..” I paused. “Also, what if I didn’t jack in? I would have died in a car accident or something?”

Lucas turned back to his computer and typed a few lines of code. “I had carbon monoxide poisoning ready to go, but I was prepared to improvise. And anyway, I didn’t actually think you would gravitate towards the game during the beta test, I just put it in there as an Easter egg of sorts. I figured most clients would only think about jacking in when they were close to their expiry dates, if they do at all. But on second thought, maybe I should take it out of the programming, it’s too much work to keep up.”

I jumped off the table and stretched my legs. My entire body felt stiff like I haven’t used it for months. “Yea, take it out. You’ll have enough work as it is when we start accepting our first commercial clients next week. We have four people scheduled on our first day which I already think is too much.”

“We’ll be fine.” Lucas was now typing more purposefully. “That reminds me, I need to finish debugging this before Monday. Do you mind picking up dinner?”

“Sure.. from that new Thai place again?”

“Sounds good.”

I smiled as I gave Lucas a quick peck on the cheek before I grabbed my purse to pick up the take out. Everything was going well for our start up. It was hard to believe that only two years ago Lucas and I were broke PhD dropouts who took a leap of faith building Virtual from our one bedroom Boston apartment. And now… well, let’s just say our first official month in business is projected to generate six figures in profits even after subtracting overhead. Mid six figures. And as soon as we open up our second and third facilities the growth would be exponential.

To top it all off, I was pretty sure Lucas was planning on proposing to me next week on my birthday. I saw a charge from some jewelry company on his credit card statement while I was doing some filing last month. Judging from the amount, it could only be an engagement ring. Lucas never would have spent that much on a piece of jewelry otherwise.

I sauntered out of the elevator from our high rise office with a pep in my step. The weather outside was just the right amount of sunny. Even the Boston air didn’t feel as suffocatingly polluted. Yes, everything was going well. Perfect, even. I eyed a meticulously trimmed bush suspiciously as I walked by. Maybe too perfect.

I felt a sudden stab of panic. The smile dissipated from my face.

Oh no.

All I can think about is you

and birds. Did you know

their bones are hollow?

It makes them lighter,

the same way your voice

weighs easy on my ear.

I don’t want to create a metaphor

out of flight. That would be bold

and ridiculous, and we both know

you’re pragmatic. So maybe

you wrap my wings when they snap.

So maybe you bring me twigs.

All I’m saying is there’s nowhere else

I’d rather nest. I mean that I’d find home

in whichever tree you rested.

I’d build houses on your body.

I’d pepper a city through your feathers.

You see, it was a Friday. On Fridays, my buddies and I head straight for the bar after clocking out. After hours and hours of standing around, feeling our brains decompose while keeping that fucking grin on our face, we felt that yeah, we deserved it. That's retail for you. Either the job kills you, or your methods of coping will.

That Friday, I met a girl. I'm talking long legs, decent rack, and red smile. She was goddamn beautiful. We talked over some drinks, laughed at some jokes, then we were fucking on her bed, though for the life of me I couldn't tell you who convinced who. In the morning, we looked at each other again and realized something.

Hey, aren't you...?

Oh god, you're...

Sean Choi.

Naomi Dawson.

Naomi Dawson. I hadn't heard that name in years. Fuck, I hadn't given two shits about the girl in almost a decade.

It's been a while, she said.

I took a sip of my coffee; it burned my tongue. Yeah, I replied. Yeah, it's been a long time.

How have you been?

I put my coffee down. Ah, I'm alright. Just another college grad working retail, you know.

Oh. She drank from her coffee, gulping it down silently like it wasn't just boiling hot two seconds ago.

What about you? I said. How've you been holding up?

I've been okay.

That's good.

Yeah, she said. It's okay.

I thought she was talking about the coffee. I brought up how hot it was, and then we went off on a tangent about coffee, of all things. Soon enough, I was walking back out the door, her phone number tucked into my pocket, dropping promises into the air that we'd meet up again.

Yeah fucking right.

Naomi and I were childhood friends. “Friends” is what I would call it, since we hung out, ate lunch, talked. It started when we were ten. I woke up the day after Halloween, punch-drunk from too much candy, and my mom started gushing to me about how Mr. and Mrs. Dawson's baby got run over yesterday.

“Oh my,” she kept on saying. “Oh my, that poor child.”

That was all they ever said – my mom, my friends, fuck, even the teachers. “Poor Naomi.” “Poor baby.” “Poor dear.” But the thing was, Naomi never acted like a dear. Never caught in the headlights, frozen in the spotlight, only moving as she'd always moved: on and on.

I got curious.

See, Naomi didn't have friends. Even if she was the lone-wolf type, the shy, small-voice type, going through four years of grade school without forming one friend was pretty fucking hard to do. It took work. I managed to mangle all the efforts of that work and become her only friend. It was hard and frustrating, but I kept at it. I kept at it and continued going at it until that blistering day in June when we graduated and she vanished from my life.

Well, fuck her, I thought. Fuck her and all her talks, all our talks. Fuck her wild, witch's laugh, fuck every ounce of food she'd ever weaseled out of me, fuck the way she said fuck, all soft, drawn-out and hesitant. Fuck her.

I was never going to see her again, especially not after that goddamn Friday night. At least, that's what I told myself, but there was something about her. Even now, I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I felt guilty. Maybe I was waiting for an apology. All I know is that every following Friday she'd text me, always these same two words:

Come over.

And I came over.

After a few weeks, I decided that Naomi had a nice bed. We lay on that bed every time I came over, watching her nice, HD TV. It was comfortable. It was nice. At the end of six weeks, though, I felt like the bed could have swallowed me up whole, and Naomi wouldn't have spared even the blink of a goddamn eye. So that sixth night, we weren't watching the TV. It was late. If we started a movie, we'd fall asleep before we could finish it, or that's what I said.

We were just sitting together, finally, side-by-side, in a silence that we had been warding off for too long now, a thin barrier that had reached its breaking point.

I spoke first.

Why'd you drop off the face of the Earth after we graduated? I said.

She stared, frowning at the blank TV like it was actually on. Then she wasn't anymore. She looked down at her hands, her face as blank as the goddamn TV.

It started with a fight, she said.

A fight?

Yes, she said. A fight.

They had loved each other in the beginning. For many, many years they loved each other, and at the end of those years, they had a child. No one remembers the child's name or what it looked like – if it had been a girl or a boy, if it had been beautiful, like its mother, or warped, like its father. All we know is that Hawé had loved it, adored it just as your mother had adored you and my mother had adored me. Every day she suckled the child. She cradled it in her arms, kissed its unwrinkled forehead, and sung to it stories that no one else knew. Aerta watched his lover as she did this. He watched as she poured her love away from him and into this creature he soon wished had never been born.

He knew what must be done.

One night, in the midst of Hawé's slumber, he stole the child from her arms. The child, perhaps having recognized its father, did not cry. It simply lay in Aerta's arms, silent, blinking, innocent to its fate. Perhaps Aerta hesitated at this. Perhaps in the sudden shadow of a doubt he looked at those clear, thoughtless eyes and contemplated fully the weight of his actions. If he did, it was not enough. That night, Aerta held the child in his hands for the first and last time, and he swallowed it whole.

Wait, I interrupted.

She turned to look at me. Her eyes were expectant, like she'd been waiting for me to cut in right at this exact moment. The thought that I was playing into her weird game pissed me off, but not as much as it should have. Naomi tended to have that effect on me.

Yes? she said.

What the fuck are you talking about? I said. I asked you a question.

And this is my answer.

But –

She nudged my shoulder with hers, smiling at me gravely.

Just listen, she urged.

No, I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her that I wouldn't just sit there and listen to her bullshit. It was fine when we were brats. She'd talk nonstop about aliens, superpowers, robots, the usual kind of kid crap that would sound like something more when coming out of her mouth. We weren't kids anymore, though. We were adults for god's sake, and adults didn't believe in shit like fairies.

But you see, Naomi had green eyes. Green like leaves in April rain, and I'm no twat poet so when I say shit like that, you know I mean it. They stared at me then, so big and full of water that they glistened, even in the gray dark.

Okay, I said. I'll listen.

Still smiling, she leaned her head on my shoulder and wrapped her damp fingers around my nicotine-stained hand.

Aerta ate his child, she continued. It was done, irrevocable, and the cry that Hawé let out at finding her arms empty the next morning bore through his already beaten heart. But it will all end soon, he told himself. Soon, Hawé will be mine once again.

Yet Hawé was the Being that ruled all beings. She watched over every plane in the universe, dipped her fingers into the swirls of stars and left behind trails of black holes, life-giving water, acid rain, and bipedal organisms. She was life and death and heaven and hell. That morning, she took one look at Aerta and knew what he had done.

Hatred as she had never known tore through her mind and aching breasts. “I banish you!” she screamed. “I banish you to the ends of the universe, where you shall never chance to look upon me again. There you shall bear the weight of all my children, you shall feel their feet shift and stomp on your back, you shall watch them grow while you decay in the filth of their waste, and you shall nourish them, knowing that they are the children of others and not yours.”

Aerta begged for mercy. “I love you,” he said.

“It is not enough,” Hawé replied.

It is said that even thousands of years after, in the dead of night, one could still hear Aerta begging, the cries tucked like secrets into the wind.

Naomi paused to grab her beer from the nightstand. She took a sip before offering it to me. I drank from it like I was watching someone else move my hands, open my mouth, and massage the liquid down my throat.

At one point in my life, I legitimately believed that Naomi was insane. Stories are stories, but you wouldn't have believed it from the way she talked. For her, mutant dolphins and hallucinogenic pencils were as real as you or me, and whenever I said they weren't, she would stop talking to me for hours, sometimes days. That night was different, though.

That night, she was speaking like the story was a fairytale. She moved her hands and paced herself, like her answer was a thoroughly memorized performance of a book she had read somewhere, sometime long ago.

Which meant that she was talking about that Halloween night, when her step-father turned his back for a second and let her baby sister step out into the road, about that random day, when her mother punished him by killing herself, as if it were all just a story. And I just didn't know what to do with that.

Naomi put away the beer and continued.

Just as Hawé promised, she bore many more children from many more men, and she sent them all to live on the wide expanse of Aerta's back. Aerta had no choice but to sustain them, to give them the water and the vegetation that would help them grow. Aerta resented Hawé for this, yet he could not stop loving her.

Every night, he sent his heart out into the skies, commanding Hawé to look at its brilliance, urging her to think of him, to return to him. Hawé's children looked upon this bright light, feeling its loneliness, and some began to join their hearts with his. After hundreds of years, the black darkness of the planet the children called Kaluhet bloomed every night with the beating lights of a billion stars and one cratered moon.

Yet the only answer Hawé ever gave was one more child, one more burden, one more wound.

And finally, Aerta ceased to endure. He did not wish to incur Hawé's wrath yet again, but neither could he sit back for hundreds, thousands of more years as her children breathed and ceased to breathe on his skin, in peace.

Painfully, he began to change. Blood ran in rivulets as he willed his skin to rip open in uneven seams. Brilliant, fertile land dried up, wrinkling into cracked ground as he denied moisture to those regions. His body arched into mountains, dipped to form valleys, trees and berries flourished in one place and shriveled up in another. Oozes of chemicals erupted from his broken skin, tainting, mutating once harmless plants and animals into things of poison and fear.

The world had changed. Aerta had changed. Yet, it was the Kaluhetians who had to choose how to live in this new environment. Would they live on harmoniously, as they had before? Or would they hunt, scavenge for land and knowledge, and betray each other in the name of survival?

Yes, it was their choice, Naomi said. But Aerta knew what they would choose.

Naomi never outright told me, but I knew her step-father never got around to doing that much fathering. His baby dead, his wife dead, a man can only take so much from life. If he didn't have Naomi, yeah, I would've gotten that. Naomi's mom died the summer after fifth grade, and the man disappeared too, in a way. That was when Naomi and I really started to hit it off, hanging out all the time 'cause she hated being at home. That summer, her stories were always about ghosts and zombies, creepy things that I swore were cool even if they kept me up at night.

I guess they lived like that, one fairy and one zombie together in a house as hush as a church. It was senior year of high school when I started to think that something was wrong. That something had changed. Naomi started skipping, which isn't like a fucking crime, but Naomi never skipped. She started sleeping in class. She'd show up looking like a goddamn corpse and refuse to talk to me.

She started to have bruises, cuts, small but gigantic on her usually perfect, acne-free skin. She'd just brush me off when I asked about them, and I figured if she didn't want to talk about it, that was her business.

But I was curious. Fuck it, I was worried. Naomi only had her father and me, and if one of us was a fucking deadbeat, then what was I supposed to do? I showed up to her house one day. She was skipping, so was I. I knocked, no one answered. Crouching down, sweating, I got the spare key out from under the mat, and I opened the door.

The rank stench of stale sweat and bitter, sour alcohol was warm, sticky, humid, but it all hit me like a cold, cement wall. I nearly gagged and stepped back outside. But Naomi was there, sitting on the floor. She was hugging her knees, not looking at me, even though she must have heard me knocking. She was looking at the couch, where, in the shadows, I could almost see something breathe.

Cans of beer, empty bottles of vodka, shards of exploded glass and glittering ash from upturned ashtrays. Everything reflected and shined in the light that spilled in through the door I'd left open behind me, everything except Naomi, her step-father, and me.

“Naomi,” I choked out.

“Not now, Sean,” she said. “Come back later.”

“I can't fucking come back later, Naomi...”

Silence.

“Tell me what I can do.”

“Last night,” she said, quietly so that I had to step closer to hear. “He told me he was dying. Cancer, he said. Isn't that unbelievable? A dream, maybe a nightmare. But this is how he chooses to cope!” She laughed, not her usual, cackling laugh. It was an adult's laugh. Bitter, like beer. “No, there's nothing you can do, Sean. There's nothing any of us can do.”

“Naomi.”

She looked at me. Finally, she looked at me.

Just go, she said.

What?

Just go, Sean.

I waited for her to say something else, anything else, but she just turned back to look at the couch. I remember the dust motes dancing between us, like a million laughing fairies.

Fine, I spit out.

I turned around and just went, slamming the door behind me.

Kaluhet became divided. Tribes formed. Towns formed. Villages, societies, civilizations, city-states, empires, countries formed and crumbled and reformed and crumbled again. Aerta watched on in savage satisfaction even as his body groaned, bones creaking and cracking, skin burning and melting.

The moon still hovered in the distance of the night skies, but stars slowly disappeared, lost in time, as the Kaluhetians fought, gloated, surrendered, and killed in a haze of red days.

Millions of cries joined together in lament over hundreds of years. Finally, finally, the sound reached the opposite ends of the universe, and Hawé shifted her ear towards the voices of her children.

“What is it, my loves?” she said, confused by the mixed sounds of triumph and loss. “What has happened in the place you call Kaluhet?”

“Mother!” they cried. “Hear us! We are the defeated, the ostracized, the starving, the weak. We were born on this cursed planet, destined to be slaves to the victorious, targets for the majority, entertainment for the fat, and nothing to the strong. We do not deserve our fate. Look, Mother, look at how we breathe! We are your children, just as they are your children! Why must we suffer like some lesser beings? Why must we live and die on our knees, reduced to nothing, knowing nothing but desperation and ridicule, right up until the very end? Mother, hear us. Look at us! Save us from this world that knows nothing but pain.”

Hawé listened to them in horror. Once again, Aerta had maimed her children. Once again, Aerta had betrayed her.

This time, she knew her punishment must be absolute.

“Aerta!” she called.

He gasped at this name, at hearing Hawé's voice. It filled him with such potent longing that the rivers, the rain, the oceans of Kaluhet stilled, every plant and hill straining to hear her words.

“Aerta,” she said again. “I punished you once, many years ago. You killed my child. I could not forgive you, I still have not forgiven you, yet you have added upon your sins by guiding the rest of my children into madness and self-loathing. Why? Why have you done this? I did love you, somewhere in this body of mine, I might still love you. But you have done this. You have done this, and I cannot forgive you.”

She looked down upon Aerta, the deformed, broken thing that she had loved so long ago. 

She hesitated. She was Hawé, the Being that ruled all, yet she hesitated.

But she knew what must be done.

“Goodbye, my once-love,” she said.

And so, the Kaluhetians received what they had wished for: an end to all things. In silence, they watched as trees everywhere began to dry up and crumble, as rivers and oceans disappeared as if they had never been. Fruits blackened and dropped like stones, flowers and leaves drifted away with the wind, and toxic fumes choked down their every breath.

Aerta was dying. Yet this brought neither salvation nor satisfaction because with his death, the Kaluhetians realized that they too would die. They realized that they had been living all this time because of him. They realized that they could not live without him. And they knew this realization – come too late – was their punishment for forcing Hawé's hand.

So they starved. Their throats burned for water. They killed each other, killed themselves, they waged feeble wars for the diminishing nutrients, and they pleaded for Hawé to bring him back. They did everything they could. But there was nothing that could be done.

Thus they lived on until the end of their days.

I waited a few seconds for her to start speaking again, for the part that came after the end. I waited so many long, silent seconds.

Naomi, I said, finally. Is this your answer?

Were you listening?

Yes, I said. I was listening.

Then you tell me.

I paused, mind blank. But it didn't matter that I couldn't think. It wasn't something I had to think about.

“You know,” I said. “It's not written in the stars or whatever that you have to suffer like your dad and your mom, or even your sister. You're alive. You're here right now, with me. I don't know what you've been doing for the last five years, but you can tell it to me straight, when you're ready. You don't have to hide behind your words, or all the shit you've been through, not anymore, because you're not some long lost story. You're a person. You have skin. You cuss and the way you laugh is fucking ridiculous. You've grown up to be a really hot broad, and you're a damn good kisser. You can be funny when you want to be. I know that you actually hate coffee, and unlike every other person on Earth, you like the smell of cigarettes. You're not dead, you're not a ghost, and you're not a fucking zombie. You're a living, breathing, human being. You don't have to go away. Not then, and definitely not now.”

Slowly, she took her hand out of mine. She looked at the TV, briefly, and then she sighed. Just an exhale, quiet even, in her usual way. But it was like I was seeing her breathe for the first time.

“Naomi?” I said.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “For keeping you here so late. You have work tomorrow, don't you? You really should start heading back.”

The sky was clear that night. It was the dead of winter, and the dry air was filled with nothing more than weak, wispy clouds and a bright, full moon. For some reason, though, I always remember hearing the rain then, hitting her window and trickling down the glass, quiet and loud, all at the same time.

“No,” I said, barely able to hear myself over the downpour. “It's too late. Do you mind if I just sleep over?”

She looked at me.

I wonder if she saw the same thing I did in that moment, if she smelled the same sour air of that day so long ago. But the way she looked at me was different from back then. That Friday night, I could see the green in her eyes.

“Okay,” she said, finally.

“Thank you.”

We lay down more comfortably on the bed, the blankets and pillows already warm. I reached out for her hand. She met me halfway, like she had wanted to hold onto me too, and like the bed, her pale, calloused fingers were warm already.

We fell asleep listening to each other breathe.