It’s like that, I say. Like the emptiness you spoke of. But it’s more like this thing inside me doesn’t quite realize it’s already dead.

I feel your eyes on me. Following my trail of words.

“That’s gross. Like an unborn fetus metaphor. Why did you have to put it like that?”

I didn’t mean to. I was only trying to explain the best I could.

“It’s fine,” you say, even if we both know it isn’t. You light a cigarette, your hands cupped as a shield. “What you’re feeling—it isn’t dead. It’s just sort of…frozen. For now.” You scratch at your scalp, like looking for bugs in your hair, only you’re trying to keep them in there, not shake them out.

Frozen. Like a body in the morgue? Like a dead star? Are those metaphors any better?

“Your problem is that you try too fucking hard. Remember when we didn’t have to try so hard? When we’d just talk about outer space all the time?”

You’re right, I think to myself. When we were younger, we did talk about space a lot. We’d lay on the grass in your backyard and stare up into the night. Your hair all over the place, all over me. The blackest spots up in the night sky—those points that were as far away from stars as possible—were the places your eyes loved to go. Something about them made you look even closer. We would make new, mundane constellations out of it all. We called them The Woods. The Town Hall. The French Girl.

But this emptiness now isn’t the outer space we were once so fascinated by. This is me and my stupid head and my own unfair measures of worth.

We’re nowhere near your backyard anymore. We’re somewhere so far away from it that we’ve forgotten all the places it took for us to get here. But we’ve still found a patch of grass to sit on—a triangle of green illuminated by the streetlamp burning between a pair of darkened apartment complexes. That cigarette dangles from your mouth, just as an old actor on a movie screen might do. It’s a Clint Eastwood cowboy in my mind. An Ed Harris astronaut, taking one last drag of that smoke before leaving Earth for the last time. In the dark, you’re breathing it in, its own shining star in the night. I look for where the blackest spot of space must be, between you and me. Maybe not dead then, I say to you. I think it’s just gone.

“Are you saying you don’t want to do this anymore?”

Don’t want to….Can’t. I’m not sure which one of those it is yet.

You look at the cigarette in your hand. “Every few years I quit smoking, don’t I?” You breathe it in, then blow smoke up into the night, obscuring the sky with a ghost-like haze for a moment before disappearing altogether. “But here we are. So what does it even matter?”

What does any emptiness matter? It’s just nothing. Think about not knowing which way is up, down, left, or right. The way we came from, or the way we’re going. What do the directions really matter anyway, when we’re in the deepest of space.

“I hate you, but I love you,” you say. “Just keep at it.”

You were always so good at that. At believing in me enough to make me believe a little too. And it still might be nice to be remembered as something more than the blackness between stars so far away. We’ll see, I say. I love you, too.