Creeping Void

The stars are going out.

For some reason, this doesn’t strike me as a sad thing. Nor a terrible one.

I am seated on a couch, far beyond the crushing grip of our gravity well. Far beyond the light of our native star. For all that, I do not know where I am. Only that I am seated on a couch, the metal of the space station’s deck cold under my feet, with my arm around someone as we watch the stars go out.

Across my lap is a blanket. A familiar one with red and green, and black stripes across its thick, cream-coloured wool. Visible on the edge of the blanket near my head, five black lines stand proudly announcing the thing’s traditional value. It was supposed to be a wedding present.

Not married, though, I’m certain of that. Watching as the stars go out, one by one, the black behind them growing to consume my whole vision, I know that I am not married. Nor yet is the person, the woman seated next to me, nestled close for warmth, any romantic connection.

There is emotion there, deep and powerful, but likewise restrained. She is at once the world and yet nothing to me. A friend, sitting side by side and watching as the stars go out.

We do not speak. We barely seem to breath, warm and comfortable on that couch among the dying stars. When the gaps in the glittering blanket of tiny light begin to outsize the patches of light, I feel a strange contentment.

No change befalls me that I am aware of. Instead, I flow smoothly from disconnectedness to contentment. I am not happy, nor am I sad. There is only the ever growing, all consuming void outside my tiny space station and the curious sense of it all being ok.

Worry is beyond my knowledge as I watch the stars slowly go out. As my ship floats in the emptying void, I think of nothing – float through the vast, cognitive emptiness as I watch the lights slowly fade.

Beside me, the woman whose name I do not know and yet would die for shifts. She is asleep, I think. And I wonder if I shall join her. Allow my eyes to close, consent to let my mind tip into the void that has consumed it. But I know that I cannot. I must keep my eyes open.

It is not a knowledge, that is the wrong word, rather it is a compulsion. I must remain in this liminal, strange place. I must watch as one by one, millimetre by millimetre the blanket of stars goes out. There is a sense that someone must be around to witness it. And the thought of not waking up again once I succumb to sleep does not cross my mind.

So complete is the emptiness that I do not even consider mourning my friend, the stranger, who is already asleep and I know will not wake again. Who I know will, now that she has gone to rest, sleep past the end of herself; as will I.

But not yet.

Not while the stars are still going out.