Jeremy looked up to the billions of stars, and thought the word "billions" and "stars" one after the other. The first was an unimaginable number, unless he thought of a dune in the Sahara, with each grain of sand counted in succession. And he pictured someone with very fine tweezers picking up each grain and launching it into the sky after its companions.
Then he thought of the idea of "stars", of which his own Sun was supposedly a member. Not something solid, exactly, but simply a burning globe, a locus of flame in the sky, so massive and roaring with infernal power that it dictated the very evolution and rhythm of all existence on his planet. Supposedly it had all spun out from the same essential source, more years ago than the number of grains in the Saharan dune still flinging itself heavenward in his mind's eye.
Then Jeremy's eyes came back down to the girl nestled in his arms, her face buried against his chest. She noticed him noticing her, and two blue eyes flew open in the night, staring with happy longing into the young man's own seal-brown gaze. And he thought of the word "lover" (or possibly "love her") and tried to comprehend a soul: a single mind occupying a unique time and place, that could peer into him and recognize his own working mind.
Not just recognize--but desire to know, desire to please, as he also wanted to please her. And even then he thought of "death", the only truly impossible thing to see. With her arms snaked around him, holding on tight, he thought he could stand to look at its face. He thought, perhaps, it had already come and gone.
The folded-up note in his pocket read: What does it matter? This happened. She was real. Now or later, it gets no less so.
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