Old stars exploded and new stars formed as he waited for her in the cabin. He passed the time slowly, trying to revel in simple pleasures – morning tea, afternoon walks, late night contemplation – repeated in an endless cycle with every minuscule particle, temporal and physical, examined and given name. After millennia he began to find pieces of her inside the plants and air as she grouped back together, renaming things in the way he had done, learning words and form once again. This time he took note but did nothing to help her – he understood now that there was nothing he could do except wait for her. There was still so much to learn that he was content to wait.
Ghosts of her began to appear on his periphery – a shadow in a sheer blue dress, her brown curls bouncing in a slight breeze, leaving messages for him inside the structures of the plants. He tended to them and encouraged them to grow, all the plants except for her flowers – he left those untouched. He felt her in them and knew they were a focus for her – she was using the flowers to regain herself, much as he had down with the stardust that he’d used to first form this home for the two of them. She was as much the flowers as he was the earth and trees and sky.
Once in a rare night of sleep – he only choose to sleep once every few months – he awoke to find her curled next to him, lying in the crook of his arm. Tenderly he began to touch her, to coax her toward him and with him, until they were together, wholly physical again, moving together up and down in a locked embrace. Afterwards he slept and when he awoke she was gone, the scent of her still on his body and bedclothes.
When he was lonely for her, he returned to the moments before he’d released her and watched himself with her, lying in the yellow roses and green grass, laughing and holding each other. He returned also, over and over, to the moment of his daughter’s death, not to watch his daughter die, for he understood that she was alive a moment before and would always be alive a moment before, but to watch her, as she stood, aghast and writhing with effort to beg their daughter’s heart to beat again. This was but a memory – the timeline long passed, but still, he yearned for her and needed every moment he had of her that was.
Of course, he also returned to the two of them, back before they’d transitioned, and watched. He saw all his favorite moments – their wedding, the birth of their daughter and son, the smile on her face just before he went before her to prepare the way as she held her hand and whispered to him. His favorite moment he rarely visited except in particularly dark times, when the wait became too much, when he stood at the precipice and stared down into the despair – in those moments he fled and relived with the best of her.
They’d been camping all weekend in a state park, making love by the side of the fire and hiking through the gentle forested hills all day. It’d been three days since they’d came to the park, and it was only one day until they had to leave and it was that moment when he’d first had the idea, first learned how it might be possible to transition and become what he was now.
They were hopping over stones across a stream, one to the next, while the water rushed around them, throwing up white bubbles and spray. Their feet were bare and they could feel the rough stones under their pink toes. She wore a lavender summer dress – the hem soaked through and stuck to her legs.
It was that wet hem that had given him the idea and for long years he worked and researched in the basement until everything was ready. They way the hem clung to her legs – it made him understand – the circle of the thing, the way the fabric rose up and down but never came disconnected.
It took him much longer to convince her. But it won’t matter, he’d told her. We can still be everything.
He knew, of course, that it wouldn’t be true, but so selfish and excited was he that he’d told her anyway, and he knew that as she rebuilt and rediscovered she would find that out – she would find out that he always knew it would be like this but he made her come anyway because he didn’t want to be alone or without her.
So he’d sold her dreams of eternal heaven.
But in reality there were challenges. And there was still despair. But the wet lavender hem, the way it stuck to her thigh – that was still his favorite because he hoped that it would be like he told her it would be, even though he knew that no one would ever follow them – he’d made sure everything would be destroyed after they transitioned – that sealed it – he knew no one else came – he’d watched the rest all the way to the end – what people were now would never understand how to do what he did all the way to the end. Nothing would ever follow them – it was only the two of them for all time and she was spread out and finding words and he was afraid she would never rebuild as he did and never come back to him and that was the despair, or part of it.
While he waited for her he replayed it all, over and over – the moments spent convincing her were not his favorite moments – they’d been exciting and powerful when he was still physical, but later, when he was able to see moments for what they really where – the deception there reminded him too much of the despair. But they still contained her, so he replayed them over and over anyway, just not as much as other moments.
They’d talked about everything, about meeting all the important historical figures and learning everything there was to learn, going back to see all the great masters and watch them, and forward into the future to watch their children and grandchildren forever and ever. They’d even talked about learning the solutions to all the great mysteries of the past – all that human mysticism that caused so much conflict – they wanted to go back and learn the truth of it.
But the hard fact was all those things weren’t nearly as interesting when he understood more, after he renamed it all and seen it all a million times and learned what great men were really about – they were men, nothing more, reinterpreted over and over by the hard line of time, and that was a line he understood better than anyone else. Even better than her.
Still, he wondered as he waited and tended to the plants, relived his memories and grew the world, about something more. Maybe there was something more, something buried deep past where he was and where she was, but if there was, it was only a renewed level of baseless mysticism, because nothing had ever given him an indication that the old ideas about a higher power could be true. He’d looked everywhere except the despair and there was nothing in there. He knew it.
While he waited, he did follow the growth of his old species with relative, if simple curiosity, just to see the big moments, but he felt nothing for any of it. It didn’t affect him when they left their planet for the stars, spread to distant planets and forgot where they came from, only to fight each other millions of years later when they were all something else. He tracked his line, just for idle curiosity, but so different where those things now from anything he recognized that he felt it was pointless. His joy was still in simple things and the dull ache of waiting for her – he felt it like savoring the hunger before a meal.
But he watched the races spread and fight and die as the their suns burned themselves out and the entropy of the universe sank all matter and energy together until there was nothing but black and his world and him, still waiting for her. Her ghosts were long distant and it had been billions of billions of years still he’d seen her last.