Timing Is Everything

Timing is everything.

I repeated that to myself in my head, changing the inflection each time. Timing is everything. Timing is everything. If I was flexible enough I would have kicked myself. The wind whispered to me in the dark, timingiseverything. As it blew her hair rustled, very close to me. We both were looking up at the twinkling lights, the opalescent moon.

“When I was a kid, you know, I wondered… I wondered if there was life anywhere else, you know?” My voice caught, like a child’s. Despite the cool night air I could smell my own sweat. I heard her shift a bit beside me, but she could have just been redistributing her weight on her legs. Too dark to tell, up here above the city. The streetlights were patchy, and in some places light not electrical in nature shone.

“I’d go out late at night and lie in the backyard and just pick a star, any of them. And I’d just look at it. Stare, I guess. Just at that one star, thinking ‘What if something’s lying in its backyard looking up at me?’” She definitely turned to look at me a bit, I think, but she still didn’t say anything. Of all the things I had imagined about this moment, flop sweat was the last of them.

“’Course, I was too young to really get the light-speed limit, right? Even if I was looking up at the same patch of sky where something else was looking back, we’d be seeing each other’s pasts. He’d be waving to dinosaurs, I’d be staring at… whatever. I’d look and look, because maybe that alien kid decided to flash his laser pointer or his phaser or whatever up at the sky, in Morse code, and maybe I’d look up at the right moment and see the little flashes- A kid, you know, diffraction and light extinction way beyond me- and I’d shine a hello back. Make the first interstellar friendship.”

Off in the distance a dull thump. A patch of city went dark, as another glimmered in brief fulmination. The sound of gunfire was low on the wind, making up the consonant sounds, timingiseverything. Behind us my terrible car, beat all to hell, clicked and hissed to itself, providing the vowels, as the engine cooled down. I was pretty sure I’d popped a tire during that hell-drive, and there was a sluggishness to the brakes towards the end that suggested some rather more permanent damage. ‘Why get a four-wheel drive? When are you ever going offroading? Save it for your student loans’. Guess I’d shown them.

I ignored the fireworks below us, and I’m pretty sure she did too. There were more important things on my mind. I couldn’t stop my hands from sweating. Timing is everything. The whispering wind blew a strand of her hair sideways, brushing my cheek. It landed like a bullwhip.

“But I guess, you know, an entire planet shining away as hard as it could is sort of hard to ignore. Those guys down at Arecibo, blasting out hello at 2400 MHz, Sputnik, the whole lot. We waved first, and we weren’t particularly picky about where we were waving, or about who might wave back.” More thuds in the distance, more of the grid at our feet blacked out. The yellow of the lights losing to the orange of fire. The rising smoke, invisible in the night, started to blur the stars, the pinpricks of light. Black tendrils like fire-sale cobwebs draped across the moon’s face.

I was babbling. She looked back up to the sky. I wondered, if I hadn’t damn near driven into her house, if she would have come with me. We’d always got along well, she didn’t seem to mind my dissertations on SETI or asteroid mining or the geology of sand. When our group hung out, she’d sit nearer to me than anyone else, at least as far as I could tell. As far as I noticed. Timing is everything. It seemed to me that the gunfire was getting closer, and the points of light overhead were glimmering.

“I mean, that was all on the news right? When they were talking about it, when the ETA was still months away, right? You know all that. It was all anyone talked about.” I wasn’t sure where I was going with this. Our group had spun on long into the night, pontificating over cheap beer. Friend? Foe? Would we be able to tell the difference? Turns out, we could.

“So, I guess… um. What I’m trying to say is… Look, I think you’re fantastic, and there’s nobody I’d rather be here with.” She turned again, and I could see the firelight of the city reflected in her eyes. I moved my hand forward, tentatively, touched hers.

The night became day. We both looked back up to the sky, where the points of light had grown brighter, closer. They had begun to move visibly, acquiring the steady trajectory of satellites. As the pieces that had been the moon came apart, tumbling and cherry-red, I felt her hand close around mine.

Timing is everything.