I met a dying man for the first time when I was 4000 suns old, somewhere on the fringes of a forgotten galaxy. I remember it in brief flashes of colors and conversations; memories upon memories slip inevitably into the tides of time. Still, I remember it was a beautiful sky. Endlessly black, bruised by the bloodstreams of nebulas. He was sitting with a tasseled blanket on his lap.

I greeted him tentatively. He turned his faraway eyes to me, and for a moment I thought I saw stars in them; they were impossibly deep, impossibly old. A tiredness lingered around him, the kind that comes with the peace of a journey's end, the silence after a supernovae.

Cold, isn't it?

I startled. Yes, I replied. The last time I'd felt cold, truly cold, was on the coastlines of Old Europa - in the darkest corners of the known universe. And yet here on the balconies of a warm planet, I felt a sharpness in the air like the bite of a scythe. I hesitated, and after some deliberation took a seat beside him on the glazed tile.

I've never seen such a sight, he said, gesturing to the sky.

I glanced at him. You don't come here often, do you? I asked. They're always like that -something about this sliver of space. The stars are clearer.

He leaned forward a little, head tipped upwards. His scarf slipped from his shoulders. I noticed that his hair was a shock of white - a silvered, pure white I'd never seen on a human. Instinctively, I reached out to touch it.

Old age, he laughed shortly. Does that to you.

How old are you? I asked. The only humans I'd seen looked nothing like him - they were undoubtedly younger, with quick, dexterous limbs. This man had... weight to him, a tangible kind of gravity.

Still transfixed by space-dust and undulating star-clouds, he shrugged his shoulders. Eighty-seven, he said.

I sat there, digesting. 87 suns? Perhaps he was young, after all.

Oh - he smiled at me suddenly - Not suns. I forget that's the unit your kind use. Years.

Years. Not even a fraction on the timeline of a sun's life. It was - it was nothing. Nothing. 87 years was the time it took to travel between two of the closest home-planets - not even time, scarcely time.

I smiled, astonished. You've barely been alive.

He laughed again, and this time it was full and deep. No, no, no, no - he shook his head, for emphasis. No. I am old. Quite very old.

You can't be, I countered. Scoffed.

I'm dying, my friend. I'll be dead in four days.

I stared at him in horror.

He looked at me, a curious curve on his lips. You live for much longer, don't you? It must be odd. Mortality.

Mortality. Death. I'd known vaguely of death; read of it in old tomes where millennia had collected like the dust on its pages, heard it between snatches of priests' prayers. And yet I'd never seen it. Never had anyone say so blatantly and fearlessly the name of that dreaded god none I'd known had ever seen the face of.

I'm so sorry, I told him. There was a grief in my throat I found unexplainable.

He gathered the scarf around him. Don't be. It's all that it is.

Beyond us, with only a low steel barrier to hold us back, was absolute space. Spaceships drew a fine, delicate net between arms of galaxies. I watched the shadows of several moons as they circled each other in cosmic courtship - behind them celestial shades of indigo and reds shifting, melting into one.

Finally, I whispered: You're not afraid?

An enormous comet threw itself across the sky, tailed by fire and flame. It lit its small path through the void with a momentary glare. Then it was gone.

His answer was clear and sure. No, he said to me. I'm not afraid. I've lived long and well. I can't live forever.

In a small voice, like a child at the side of their grandfather, I spoke. But what if you could live forever?

He looked at me incredulously. Why would you want to live forever?

Light blazed across our faces in a violent, vivid wash of gold. I twisted and saw a world burn to ashes - a sun, collapsing in some far-flung stretch of the cosmos. Even from there, on this pioneer planet, I could feel the heat of the most glorious pyre that could ever be known.

The dying man gripped my arm; his face was full of wonder.

His hand was weathered like desert-stone, lines ran deep into his skin those handful of years have inexplicably carved. I held the hand of that dying man and felt a blinding awe and all-consuming terror rise in my throat.

Above us, the stars began to fall.

-

I began seeing his eyes everywhere - buried in the cores of passing star-fire, blinking from the windows of traveler's posts where rain left scorch marks on my skin. Humans became my obsession - that frail, fickle race which had only just begun to enter worlds beyond their own. This utter curiosity devoured me whole - some morbid fascination compelled me to find why they died as they did; an explanation for their undaunted departures and easy farewells.

I found that humans stank of death.

Death left black stains on their fingers, sharpened their tongue into bitter blades. I found brothers without brothers, fathers without sons, and saw how grief dragged them down into an abyssal sea even Europa could not claim. Along the Celestial Highway, I watched as a mother lay by the side of a child and scream, guttural and hoarse, until the earth wore away beneath her knees. There was a girl with hair the color of blood and fire who I watched grow into a woman. She died at the age of twenty-six - struck by a sickness that ate at her bones as hysteria clawed up my stomach. I watched as she stumbled, delirious, to my side on a stretch of grassland and marveled at constellations I knew she couldn't see. Some knew no graceful surrender, no quiet finale.

And yet they lived. Lived well. I saw in them a wondrous and dangerous instinct I associated with the implosion of suns, the same one I saw so long ago. They simply chose not to comprehend their own mortality - they chose instead to to dance wildly and paint, too, with equal ferociousness. Whatever would be the point? A woman with flowers in her hair had asked. There are greater things to do.

They flung themselves into the universe as comets did, with all abandon of reason and rationality. They bled with everything they could give, because they could only give once. And they loved with a love I'd never seen, one that I'm only just beginning to understand in all its complexity.

But it's not that complicated, is it? She spun dizzyingly on her heels, closing her eyes - offering herself to the heavens. We love this way because we will never love again.

They dream. They speak of centuries and millennia they will never reach - of lineages and legacies someone else will one day continue. Humanity, which remain the weakest and least defended, have ambition that blurs into audacity, a desperation to live with little compromise, and a love that burns, and burns, and burns.

She kissed me. Shyly, on the corner of my mouth. I felt, then, all those lifetimes fall away - all those nameless suns shatter like glass. Suddenly, I was young - so, so young, when the world was full of colors I'd yet to believe. I love you, she said softly. She tasted like ash.

I began to understand. And I began to fear.

-

I've seen a thousand suns birthed and broken. Time is nothing to me now; all it does is crawl on and on in some cyclic chase, and I'll witness it until its end. That is my destiny. That is my death.

How long have I been dying? I don't know that either. I was alive, a long time ago.

There are flowers here now, blossoming in the eternal springtime of this moon. They remind me of her in a way that invites the kinder contemplation; the one that holds me back from that cliffside. Sometimes I want that wound - it gives me the momentum to feel. I never thought I'd beg for that kind of salvation.

The days are becoming colder. There's an ache in my legs that wasn't there before, and a heaviness to my steps. Perhaps I'll head back to the balcony and look at the stars again. There's a planet in the Western Quarter that's entirely lit with rings of metal; next to it, a star-belt shielded by a near-mirage of pale spacecrafts. Human settlements, can you imagine?

I stand vigil over them. They remain feeble, fragile things - easily damaged, easily taken. They frightened me; now I feel only reverence touched by an unspeakable sorrow. Humans, I believe, are dangerous creatures. They have the utter passion of utter poets. In the austerity of space they are defiant, and that conviction in their defiance is what gives them their strength. From voids and nothingness they will rise, and rise, and rise.

Why would you want to live forever?

We stood there, two immortals on the brink of infinity. I began to weep.