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her heart was heavy with time.

throughout her long life, she had always been told that all she needed was time, that time would heal all wounds and that the only cure for heartbreak was it's certain and eventual decay. but when she sat hunched and gray and age-mottled and stared at the stars, familiar constellations to which her life was a mere moment, she knew it was not true.

no time had passed for her. every moment was the same.

she may have lived a life, had a family and babies and grandchildren and seen a bicentennial and a new millenium and what she was sure was an apocolypse, but for her, it was all an instant, all the same loss lived out day after day. she stared at ageless orion and she wept. for though sixty years had passed she knew in her skin and her spine that she was the same girl who cried the day she lost him. she knew that she lost him the same way every day because her life, accelerating every year, was left behind by time.

the stars looked down on her, cold elders she'd gazed at once with him. they seemed no less distant and ancient to her now than they did when he'd held her by the waist and murmered "ursa major. and mars," in her ear. she still felt small, and cosmically young, and no wiser. no more impervious to pain. he'd taught her about the universe, about the age of the world and the galexy and each particle in her own body. and when he was gone, he left with her the understanding that there was no time. that she was always, always happening. there was no past, and no way to run into the future to escape it.

the wind gusted lightly through her thinning hair. in it, she almost heard his whisper: "venus is the brightest." he was there beside her, as he was and as they'd been. a boy, still. eternal. timeless.

"you're right," he breathed, as wise at this moment as he'd been when she was a girl. "there is no time, no past, no future." he pointed above her, at their sky and their stars, held her hair in his hands. "but also no loss. how can there be if every moment is the same?"

he caught a tear on the tip of his finger and held it out to her. "i am with you. in the salt of your tears and in the stars and in the molecules of the endless universe." she inhaled, and breathed the universe in.

her boy looked at her fondly, at her aged body and face and child's eyes. "what did i tell you?" he asked, firmly but with great compassion.

"everything is everything," they said together.

and he vanished, into the air or the sky or the past or the future which was all the same thing.