and we miss it

Once upon a time, we died when our sun died, and there is nothing but our words to say that we ever existed. Our sun is a black hole, and our memories are lost in tears of cosmic rain. We loved and lost, worried and found things we deemed higher than ourselves: Gods, corporations, medications, and meditations, but by the end, none of us or our thoughts, hopes, and passions would make it. A whole history locked between the stars, becoming a mystery, which, like wine, is fine over time.

Mallory Weathers was the last person on Earth. She had asthma and was a bit overweight and pale, which accentuated her black hair and blue eyes. She was 15 and walked around the museum well after it had closed. No one else was there. Earth was not popular, but at one time had been in Vogue.

She saw domestic life and the great outdoors in a translucent transport bubble. She watched our movies, read our books, and decided she wanted to major in Habitable Earth when she was older, but had already begun studying our former existence. She grew up 38 light-years from our former sun, and it was a two-day trek to our once-hospitable, combative planet. Earth was in the process of becoming exactly as it was through a biosphere that produced carbon and oxygen, and with the sun at the distance we needed it to be, but due to waning interest, funding had been cut several times.

Her curiosity about the planet and our lives was natural for a girl her age, but a dwindling number actually came to see what we were. She found it very interesting that we were capable of so much love and murder, and when did this thing called kissing, which was not practiced on her home planet. Still, she wanted to experience it, because though her intuition said it was lovely, she wanted to know what made it so special as a sign of affection. Numerous books had been written about the subject, but none of them had the concrete answers she sought. There was a kissing booth, but the sign she read before entering said this was nowhere near the actual experience, and when she looked for the writer’s name, she found nothing and thought how do they even know? It was like saying Lobster was delicious. You can’t know anymore. Or at least that is what was thought.

There were certain areas where you could step out of your transport and wander around the woods or a city. There were no animals, but pictures and holograms of cars and people, plenty of plants and soil, the rocks of mountains, and the sand of deserts. She had to look up where she was, and found out rather quickly she was in Chitwan National Park on the outskirts of Kathmandu. There were leopards, tigers, elephants, rhinos, crocodiles, and gorgeous vegetation. In particular, she liked the silk cotton tree, which she knew by sight and did not have to look up. She could feel and touch that. The animals did not smell. They were supposed to install the smells of all life on Earth, but it was one of the first projects scrapped in the funding cuts. She loved the feel of cotton, something they tried to bring back to her home, but it never really took off. According to most, including her folks, there was nothing of value in preserving Earth, and it was all just a waste of money, but Mallory thought there was much to learn from this blue dot. She cherished every moment she was allowed to visit and had walked around where we once were whenever she could. She had read about the animals she saw, but it was still up for debate what the smooth-coated otter did, and just how aggressive the honey badger was. She saw hunters, which always made her cry, and she had to tell herself they were holograms, just like the animals, but to her, the hunters were the real animals, and she watched them shoot a tiger licking its paws beneath a tree. There has been talk of converting Earth into a virtual hunting ground, where you could even hunt us if you had the money. Still, for now, it remains a floating museum, full of flora, the latest technology, and Mallory Weathers, whose fascination never wanes after the death of a tiger. Quite the opposite. She watched us and wondered what we were enjoying in this, and that night, in her tent, she lay there for several hours thinking about that until she heard what sounded like real feet. Probably an employee, she thought, and she hoped they’d let her stay until she had gotten some sleep, but the noise of the footsteps stopped right by her head, on the other side of the blue tarp. She pinched her leg to make sure she was not dreaming and said, “Who is it?”

The feet scampered off, and she never saw which of us made them, but in the morning, there sat a letter beside her camp. It read as follows:

We were not all bad. More good than bad, and though it is not as real as you and I, it once was, and still breaks my heart to see the tiger get shot, but that was only a quarter of a fraction of a fraction of 0.1%. Most of the time, we sat in cars, had dreams, and the dream, the desire to do something else with one’s life, was to be kissed by someone who may not have recognized you otherwise. We wanted to live, Mallory. We loved life here.

She looked around and saw nothing real in sight. She couldn’t find us, and we could not find her, but for a moment there was a connection between what was, what is, and what might be.

Her tears flowed, and as they pooled into her dry lips, she wondered if this was what the start of a kiss felt like.