Reversed

Amanda and I sat among the stars and looked up at the ground. The blue with eddies of white stretched through it were my favorite. In my head, they were lovers.

“When I go, I want to be in the blue.” I told Amanda. She laughed a little and looked over at me. I looked back and was stunned as usual by the wild black curls that framed her face. She was beautiful, always beautiful. And forever smiling and happy. It was what I loved about her.

“Life doesn’t happen in the blue parts.” She reminded me. I shrugged.

“Still. I want to live in the blue.”

She rolled her eyes and kissed my cheek. “Whatever you want, love.”

I smiled, even though groundgazing made my stomach spin. Everything down there was so small. How could anyone exist in a place that could not reach infinity?

I was afraid of how I would be down there. The stories were vague, but they were not beautiful. Here was so beautiful. And time was ticking away. I could leave at any moment, and be thrust into a world I knew so little about.

Suddenly the ground looked too close and my lungs didn’t want to breathe right. They expanded larger and larger, but nothing filled them and they became two internal vacuums, sucking the rest of me away with them.

Amanda wrapped her arms around me and pulled me closer. I was spinning in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the dark and the stars until I caught upon her eyes.

“Babe. You’re here with me. You’re okay.” She knew how I got. We’d have conversations that spooled on for what felt like forever, talking about anything and everything. So of course she knew how I got. And she was always there, my anchor.

I kissed her and closed my eyes and pushed everything far away. We were safe, on the edge of existence. Amanda wasn’t going to leave. I wasn’t going to leave. We would be together in the stars forever.

“I love you.” I told her.

“I love you.” She replied. She didn’t believe in ‘toos.’ Said that if you said ‘too’ at the end of ‘I love you,’ you were only echoing, and echoes of feelings were not as strong as the real things.

“I love you.”

We repeated it back and forth, avoiding the echoing, until I forgot that my lungs hadn’t wanted to breathe and everything was okay. Ground gazing was just a hobby, and in that moment I could pretend that we would never end up there, way above on Earth.