From their first connection to the last day of llhaesa’s life, Jahrae and llhaesa were together for just over 2 years, yet Jahrae embraced and savoured the two years as the most important and the most precious of her young life.

Llhaesa was 3 years her senior, and at their respective ages, life moved at different paces.

Llhaesa was already established for life, with a rapidly growing worldwide reputation. School lie in llhaesa’s life rear view mirror; just one goal accomplished in a string of infinite goals.

By contrast, Jahrae was still a student, and despite now having things available to her in life many could never hope to have, she needed to remain disciplined and complete her own studies, to feed her need to be independent, to pursue her own interests, including her own career.

Jahrae majored in public administration, a high risk option on a planet where women were now actively being excluded from public service positions. Yet she carried the same faith and hope as llhaesa, where one day things would be set right. In such a new world, there would be great need for dedicated public servants to replace those who had abused their power.

To her everlasting credit, llhaesa had actually been the one to help Jahrae to refocus on her own needs, and in that regard llhaesa would gently remind her to stay true to her dreams. “I’m a part of that dream, Jahrae” Llhaesa would say “but I should not be all of what you dream.”

Jahrae grasped this, but she was also so fully involved in love. The love fuelled her day, it helped her rise with a smile, helped her study harder, helped her endure lectures in class easier, helped her to research with more ardent fervour, to go about various tasks at home with more of a spring in her step and a smile upon her face. Love was a way of life, as much as it was also a catalyst.

The two years together were marked by an infinite bond of love, and within that bond lay little micro-memories that assembled into the collective history of that time.

What Jahrae really struggled with was how the memories were all one way, only her own. Llhaesa had been robbed of her share of the memories, just as she had been robbed of life.

Jahrae was still recovering, still in the midst of a night that saw her dream of llhaesa’s face in the night sky. Jesnsera encouraged her to find peaceful sleep, and so she sent her mind backward to a time just after her and llhaesa had married.

There was this place they would go outside the city, not that far beyond her own parent’s home, perhaps another 30 kilometres beyond. Jahrae and llhaesa had found the spot whilst on a weekend hike; initially they had paid little attention, but llhaesa had slightly twisted her ankle, and so they decided to set their tent on the spot of the injury and stay the night.

It proved to be a fortuitous injury. As day lost purchase on the capitol area and continued on its never ending journey of travelling around the planet, the sky played through the parade of vivid sunset colours, finally yielding to the dark of night. Suddenly the sky came alive with stars that were quite content to hide by day. The light of the city was shielded by a sizeable hill just to their south, and so the stars were free to ever so slowly ply their way across the blackness and entertain the two campers.

Their makeshift camp was set at the crest of a smaller hill. There were no trees for several hundred feet in every direction; this was a place of rock and grasses and vivid green – sometimes with hints of orange – mosses. At the very crest lie a boulder perhaps 2 metres long, 1.5 metres in width, and 1 in thickness. It too was covered by the moss, and even in night the reflected light of the twin moons was sufficient to set the colour of the moss mildly aglow. The boulder served as the focal point for their immediate environment, almost as if some ancient being had decided this would mark their own favourite location.

As Jahrae and llhaesa looked around, the sky dropped below them on 3 sides; only the hill blocking Arrhazonan light infringed upon the sense of place as pinnacle. If they positioned themselves with back to the hill, which the two lovers did soon enough, there was almost a sense of detachment from the ground below, and a new sense of place amongst twin moons and the stars.

Jahrae always remembered llhaesa’s comment on this feeling: “Either we are truly floating amongst the stars, or else we are being cast off to them.”

The two were so enamoured with the sky they decided to forego the tent and sleep in the open. Sleeping bags were coupled into one, and once snugly inside, the two lovers gave of themselves to one another, paying homage to the universe and all of its infinite wonders, of which they were but two.

Back in the current reality where llhaesa had been lost, Jahrae slept uneventfully and soundly for the remainder of the night, comforted by some strange feeling that llhaesa was in fact remembering that night time sky, wherever her spirit may be.