“Can you believe it?”
We were lying on blankets that smelled of the stale air of the second-floor closet, draped across parched grass and silty soil. I shifted gently (the blanket was small) and looked at her through the corner of my eye. It was too dark to admire her dusty lashes and white-streaked hair, but her eyes were trained, trance-like, toward the star-splashed night sky.
“What?” I had become used to her half-formed thoughts and broken sentences when she was deep in thought.
“I’m watching the same stars that my ancestors watched. The same stars that the Polynesians used to sail across the Pacific, the same stars that humans, for generations to come, will watch. Isn’t that humbling?”
I nodded, even though I knew she couldn’t and wouldn’t notice. “Yeah, it really is.” Did she even hear me? I might never know.
To be honest, I didn’t know how to respond to many of the things she told me back then. Should I have pitched in, comforted her more often? Should I have, at that instant, wrapped my arms around her and never let go? Would that have made a difference?
She continued as if I weren’t there.
“The stars are so kind to allot us all the same amount of light. Think about it, the world’s richest man and its poorest can both look up at the sky tonight, and their faces will be illuminated just the same. Like yours, and like mine.”
Her arm brushed against my hand as she turned to face me. Like all the times before, I felt as if it were the first time I’d ever seen her, but now I realize it was the last.
Should I have taken more time to memorize her features? Could I have told her to open her eyes so that I could look at them just once more? Yes. Yes. The answer to each of these countless questions I’ve posed to myself over the years has always been yes.
“Do you think the stars will remember me?” she said, so softly.
I didn’t know what she meant, but I replied anyway, in a voice that even to me, sounded scared. “Why do you even ask? Of course they will. But why are you thinking about this now?”
Something changed then, and she sat up. Startled, I called her name, but she was gone. She didn’t look back.
Most people, when asked when they realized things weren’t all as they seemed, gave me the response “I don’t know.” I wish I too could say those three simple words, but I did know.
It was that night, which looking back, was engulfed in “what ifs” and “should haves” and “nevers”. A day that could’ve reshaped lives, but simultaneously, agonizingly, the day that I did the least when it mattered the most.