(Segment I: unedited)

You don’t know how long you will have something; when you will lose it; how great the impact will be when it leaves.

That was all he had to offer her. Nothing fancy; nothing beautiful. Nothing a girl with a broken heart would have wanted to hear.

Especially not from a boy who looked, upon closer inspection, far too much like the one who had left her behind. But since she wasn’t looking, or listening, it didn’t matter who he was. Nothing mattered except for that bloody, broken, shattered, aching heart, and she had her little half-moon fingernails dug so deep into the skin over it, she looked like she wanted to rip it right out.

This was the business of grief. All he had to offer were a few empty words, handed out like condolence cards. They swelled into that tight black package of grief that rested just left of her ribcage and right under her heart. It was what he was trying to say to the girl before him, hoping that his meager, disillusioned words will steal underneath the downturned lip of her hat and comfort her.

It was Monday. He was thinking about this as he absently shifted his smile from sorrowful to sympathetic. Keane had left on a Monday just like this, two weeks ago – hot, sticky, tearful. Two weeks ago he had watched this girl, with her funny cropped hat, wrap her bare arms around Keane’s waist and sob until the tears turned her eyelashes black. She blinked glistening dark dewdrops, an inkwell frame to the swollen red skin of her eyes.

She had stood three feet to the left of the driveway when Keane drove away, toes dug deep into her peculiar black brogues. His grandparents watched until the car veered out of sight, and then turned to shuffle back into their darkened den. He had taken a seat on the burning front steps, reluctant to run back to the comforting bleakness of his room, and remained in joint silence with this girl.

The sun scuttled back into the clouds, leaving swollen colored streaks in the waning sky, and then its brightness had vanishes all together. Stars came out and danced across the swirling sky, a procession of white-hot gems that burned through his lowered eyelids. His cheeks flushed and burned, and his cowlick drooped along the dip in his forehead.

But the girl, she stood until her knees buckled, and then she sprawled across the yellow grass, bare legs resting like icicles along the loamy ground. She stared into the distance like she could will Keane to turn around.

But boys like him, they weren’t apt to come back to the things they had left behind.  

Half-asleep, he had amused himself by thinking. Calculating. Relieving the culmination of all these strange events, and everything his grandparents had shuffled away from. He watched the trembling curve of the girl’s shoulders and wondered why she was so upset about Keane.

Keane, who didn’t cry for anyone. Keane, with his relentless ambition and his ridiculous ideas. He had driven everyone away except for this girl, and now he was driving himself away from her.

Why was she so sentimental? And why, he reflected sadly, wasn’t he?

The air had begun to smell like smoke – it was the chimney again, roaring alive without provocation – when the girl rose. She was just a shadow now, trembling under the white of the moon. Her mouth moved, but there was no thank you or even goodbye. She simply wiped her nose and marched away without a backward glance, one hand fixed firmly on the brim of her hat.  

Yet since that Monday, she visited on a daily basis. And because everyone else was busy, he slid into the pew beside her and whispered about loss and recovery. Keane had told him this – that the only way to restore hope in a grieving person was to tell them things got better from here.

“He loved me,” the girl was saying. “He loved me more than infinity.”

He touched her shoulder, a round hump of flowered cardigan, before drawing back. “I’m sure he did. Of course he did.”

But he doubted it. There was nothing Keane loved more than the thought of infinity and immortality. His girlfriend was beautiful, sure, but she wasn’t lovely enough to compete with his obsession with the workings of a fading universe.

No one could. Because it wasn’t just here – it was everyone else. It was the mere existence of other people that made Keane crave to move beyond them. He had notions of destiny and visions of a very bright future, neither of which aligned with normalcy. Nobody came close to usurping these dreams, not even a girl whose fragile ambition complimented his own.

Keane wanted to reach beyond the walls of this solitary sanctuary. He wished to cradle the world within his veined palms. And someday, he would.

But his brother couldn’t tell this to the girl, because to do such would be to acknowledge that she would be permanently left behind. So he kept his mouth shut, and murmured in all the right places. And at half past twelve, she rose. Straightened her skirt. Planted one hand on her hat and left, silent and still grieving.

She would walk down the street. Turn left. Mount the two sets of stairs to her dilapidated apartment building and strut towards the door, feet thudding on the thin floor. And once she was inside, she would cry again.

He knew this because he had followed her. More than once. But that wasn’t important – what was important was that Keane hadn’t, and had remained blissfully oblivious. Keane had kissed and laughed and threw her funny hat to the floor, because he was a boy who had never faced denial.

The girl, for all her crying, had stacked up plenty of denial. Enough to flood the scratched, empty floors of her apartment. Enough to drown her, silence her, send Keane into one of his lectures. She tried to lock the door and board the windows. She kept all of her denial inside, because it was too ugly a beast to be unveiled. With it, she wouldn’t be half as beautiful.

Which was why she cried. And came to the church, and sat inches away from the boy who didn’t hate her, and let her sickening secrets fill the air between them.

On the pew, she had left a slip of paper. It brushed against his thigh, burning a hole through his leg. Every week there was another note; a question that, if unanswered, would become an avalanche.

His fingers shook as he picked it up. Unfolded it. Smoothed out five even creases, one for each time he had touched her shoulder. The script was smaller today, small enough to build the ache behind his eyes. When he squinted, the tiny sprawl became letters, which in turn became ragged, sad words.

Gideon, it said, what if the universe is bigger than Keane?

The sentence flashed before his eyes. It took him a second to realize he was crying. The universe couldn’t be bigger than Keane. At least, not for this girl. He was being sentimental, he realized, which was rare. Something different.

This was personal. It wasn’t heartbreak speaking – it was him, tears salty on his lips, the blood rushing to his head. It was infinitely painful, and he hated it. He wanted it gone, gone, gone. Sentiment, he knew, was for silly girls. But fear, that was for him.

Because once Keane discovered that the universe was indeed bigger than him, and nothing that he could control, he would return. Convulse. Contract. Explode. His rage would dance across the Louisiana night sky like a million of those glittering stars, an all-consuming source of light that would quickly turn to darkness.

The universe is infinite, he wrote. His hands were trembling so badly that the i’s became slashes, scarred pencil lines. This was reassurance, not condolence. Infinity was expected.

Reality, however, was not.