"No," I reply, sounding more assured than I really am. She is referring to aliens; I to God, but what difference does it really make? Couldn't we both be talking about the same thing, really? Couldn't God be an alien of the greatest kind?
We lay on my rooftop, as on so many nights, and stare at the stars up above. Tonight the sky is particularly clear, and you can make out the exact line where the light ends and the nothingness begins. There is always a border, isn't there?
"What do you think they look like?" she asks. We've had this conversation before, but immediately I start to think about heaven. I'm not sure I believe in the place, but there's gotta be something better than this.
"They're disgusting ugly creatures," I tell her. "They feed their intellect alone and they know far more than we do." She's quiet, as if processing the information. For the first time I realize that it's the blackness she's looking at, and not the stars. "I think I've met them before," I say.
She lays still, not responding to the words I say. Perhaps she understands more than I think, more than I know. I look where she's looking, into the empty darkness, but I see nothing there.
"What if it all fell down?" she asks, and I'm not really sure what she means. The stars? The world? God?
"What direction is down?" I retort, stalling for time. What if it did fall, where would that leave us? And in the grand scheme of things, who are we anyways? Who is she, and who am I? And does it really matter?
We lay on the rooftop, gazing at the nothingness between the stars. But the light, it's always there.
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