A quick story I wrote in one of my journals as part of a keyword challenge an artist friend of mine and I used to have fun with.

“I could stare at the sky for hours on end,” she said as her eyes worked overtime to capture the full splendour of the night sky.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, mostly rhetorically, “It’s too dark to see anything.”

“You’re kidding, right?” she responded incredulously without turning to look at him, “You can see everything.

They let that hang there in silence for a little while, until she turned her head and noticed that he had been staring at her the entire time.”

“All of the things?” he asked.

“All of the things.” She repeated back to him with a warm smile.

He rolled onto his back and joined her in looking up at the vast nothingness. They didn’t speak a word for what felt like an eternity, but if it was, then it was a comfortable eternity.

It was a mild night. Mild enough that she hadn’t felt the need to wear her jumper. He too was in a t-shirt. When she did star to feel a chill, she shuffled closer to him so that their shoulders were touching. Doing so filled her with a warmth that wasn’t just down to their shared body heat.

“Do you see?” she asked him.

“I think so,” was his response.

She asked him to describe what he could see and the request prompted within him a minor panic, but he didn’t want to ruin the moment, so he considered what it was that he thought she might be seeing, and started to describe it to her.

He told her about the moon and the stars. He spoke of tiny glowing dots that may or may not be distant planets. He invented constellations and gave them hilarious stories. And as he did all of these things, he started to see them himself. He saw all of the things.

Eventually, without really noticing, he stopped talking and just watched. Perhaps the most amazing thing about space was that that was exactly what it was. For all the brilliance he was now seeing, for the most part what he was seeing was space, nothingness.

When he rolled back onto his side, he noticed that she was now staring at him with that same warm smile.

“What?” he asked.

“I was just watching your eyes.” She answered.

He thought about this for a beat.

“What did you see?” he asked, looking into her eyes and seeing the gloriousness of space reflected back at him.

“All of the things.” She said.