The Darkness Outside Us

by Eliot Schrefer

Nowhere is truly empty. The thought makes me feel lavishly alone. Somehow, space is so deeply melancholy that it’s not at all sad, like a note so low it ceases to sound. Even my sorrow about my insignificance feels insignificant.

I remember wanting her to admire me. But I was just a kid, so the best I could do was hug her. Five years later, and I’ve started thinking it’s the best any person can do in most situations.

“Rover, stop,” I say. Rover does not stop. It’s a jellyfish in still water, motionless while its arm prints away. Rover is both facing me and not facing me. Rover has no eyes. Rover has no face. That fact is suddenly horrifying.

Beneath that explosion of sensation, my last thoughts are of Kodiak dying alone, of both of us dying alone. I wish I could share dying with him.

I hold the thin balsa in my fingers, tears in the corners of my eyes. I can print a new bridge. But it will be polycarb, not wood. Wood can’t be printed. Wood can only be grown. This bridge was once alive, part of a tree surrounded by other plants and creatures. It once pulled carbon from the air and made it solid.

There’s warmth near me, near the curled-up nautilus of me. There’s only one warm thing for thousands of miles around, and he’s placed his body around mine. I should feel relief at that, but all I feel is empty, empty, empty. What am I?

“Well, yes. That was how life on Earth worked, too. People did a lot of tasks and tried to keep death as far away as possible.”

I rub my hands over my face. Strange, but his insult actually makes me feel less angry. It’s as hard to be Kodiak as it is to be Ambrose.

Why shouldn’t this be the honest view? If it would mean I could live my life in peace, why can’t I just choose to believe what I see and what I’ve been told and be done with it?

Insanity used to be a stranger that lived on the other side of the world. Now it’s moved next door. It’s only a matter of time until it becomes shipmate, lover, self.

We are the new normal, because we are the new human. The only human.

You love Kodiak. This is the hidden miracle of all this: you might be loving each other deeper than any humans have ever loved, have ever needed to love, have ever had the occasion to love. Well, maybe Adam and Eve did, but you and I both know we don’t think they ever existed.

This lifetime is yours to make what you will of it.

The universe has no light in it anymore.