“How can a world that looks so beautiful be so ugly?” she asked. She was always asking him these sort of deep, mysterious questions. Sometimes he worried about her.

“What do you mean?”

“Look.” She pointed at the sky, blotchy pink and purple. It was still dark out and that’s what was so pretty.

The sky looked like the darkest shade of purple mixed with the very lightest shade of blue. In front of that was the clouds. Pink. But dark pink. Almost burgundy. No, they were burgundy. Technically. But they felt pink. Like somewhere in your heart, you knew they were pink, no matter what anyone said. Then there were the stars. You know, those early morning stars. The only ones left at 6:30 on a mid-October morning. There were only about four that you could see, but they were so bright. The brightest ones ever, like little diamond flashlights. And when you looked up, you knew – you just knew – that there had to be something more. Something more than life and sometimes it’s okay to die. But that made her so sad.

“It’s ironic, you know.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, just feeling the bitter cold on her cheeks, trying not to cry. When she opened them, the tears were just brimming, threatening to fall, dangerously close to the edge.

And he didn’t understand. He never understood. “What is?”

“The way the world can be so full of hatred and lust and bad, bad people, and then you can just look at something in nature – anything, really – and it’s like this one little piece of happiness in a world of terror. And so much death. But look up at the sky.” He looked. She waited, patiently, expectantly, for the confused look, the one that told her she shouldn’t be with him. He didn’t think about this kind of stuff, You know, deep stuff. “The sky shows us now, even in a hurricane, whenever. You look at the sky and you can tell there has to be something more, something after death.” Maybe it was just since her uncle died in that car crash on that fateful night so long ago, the night she lost everything, but it seemed she was always talking about death and life after death. He held her close, trying to comfort her, but it didn’t help. He didn’t know what it was like. “There just has to be something better, bigger, than this, than us.

He didn’t get it. He would never understand, never feel this. Never feel anything real. But she loved him so much. Or at least, she used to. But he didn’t understand her, didn’t love her. Not really. Not truly, fully, the way she was capable of loving him.

And once again, she looked up. Into one single star. And she knew her death was justified.