I understand that Thomas and Kathe want to be with me at the end, but this is the point where our roads diverge. You and me, we did what we could to build the future, Mila, but it isn’t for us. Why should Kathe and Thomas bring grief with them among the stars when they can carry memories instead? I want them to remember me as I am now, not the way I might be one day down the road.
It’s like we said all those years ago—sometimes you just have to live in the moment and enjoy what you have now, not hold on for one day and what’s to come. I want to enjoy what’s here while I can. We were the last generation who could have turned the tide. By the time Kathe and Thomas came along, it was too late to undo the mess we’d made. Climate change had already passed the tipping point, and whatever measures we put in place from then on out could only slow things down, not reverse them.
Perhaps it sounds egotistical, but I feel I owe it to the Earth to stay with her as long as I can. No one, not even a planet, should have to die alone.
August 16, 2200—Colorado
I’m going to cheat and talk about starlight, instead of the sun. Then again, the sun is a star, even if we usually don’t think of it that way. The stars on this particular day are important to remember; it’s the day we started saying goodbye.
We were vacationing in Buena Vista, staying at a resort built up around a hot spring. We went skinny-dipping in the springs on our last night, and even though it was high season, we had the place entirely to ourselves. You leaned back against the pool’s edge, and said, Well, I’m dying. Just like that.
You’d been losing weight for a while, but I wanted to pretend it was just your appetite slowing down now that we were both past middle age. You’d already considered all your options, you told me, talked to all the doctors. You’d tried everything there was to try—radiation pills, alternative therapy, even the more aggressive forms of chemo like they had in the old days. Those weeks you told me you were visiting your sister? You were really puking your guts out, suffering, but you didn’t want me to worry until you were really sure there was something to worry about.
The only thing left to try was gene therapy, and that was a bridge too far. It’s fine for babies, you said, fetuses in the womb who don’t know any better, but I know who I am and I wouldn’t feel like myself anymore if I let them scrub me clean. It’s my own body’s cells betraying me. Maybe I just have to live with that. Besides, why go through all that trouble and expense when at my age, there’s only a five percent chance of success? I want to enjoy as much of the time I have left as I can, not spend it hooked up to machines.
Then you reached into the backpack you’d carried out to the hot springs with us and pulled out a small terra cotta pot holding a Gibraltar Campion. It might have been from the very same seed batch as the one I grew for you all those years ago. Yours was barely a seedling though, growing crooked like it wouldn’t survive a strong wind.
I never did have your knack for it, you said. You held out the pot to me and smiled that lopsided smile of yours. Sometimes you just have to live for the moment, right? Appreciate what you have and not worry about the future.
Damn you for throwing my words back at me. How dare you give up? How dare you throw everything away when we still had so much living to do? But I could only stare at you and the Campion.
You let a full minute of silence go by before you asked me if I was okay. If I was okay when you were the one dying. What could I say? All my words dried up in that moment. You took my hand. We sat in the hot spring, your fingers in mine under the water, and tears ran down my face. Later, we made love, and I was crying then, too. I think I cried more that night than I did at your funeral.
The sky was utterly clear. There’s nothing like a skyscraper for miles in Buena Vista and next to no light pollution. On a night as clear as the one on which you told me you were dying, the sky was a bowl of blue so dark it passed into black and came out the other side.
That blue-dark bowl closed over the mountains, sealing us in, but everywhere we looked, there was light. I want to say the stars were bright, and they were, but they were so bright and there were so many of them, they looked fuzzy.
The stars between the stars were visible, and somehow it was different than looking at them from the top of the world, even though there isn’t much light pollution in Svalbard either. The stars seemed farther away. They seemed alive, like the whole of the dark was crawling with silver. I could almost see the arm of the Milky Way unfurling around us. It was enough to make me dizzy. Or maybe that was the hot water from the spring. Or the thought of letting you go.
Right before we fell asleep that night, you lay spooned against my back. I held your hands, your arms pulled all the way around me. I thought if I held on tight enough, maybe you wouldn’t go. You leaned forward and whispered in my ear, Take care of my flower for me, when
