Enjoy yourself. It's later than you think.

[roman sundial]

I wake up in our house. My husband is already gone, marked his leaving by pressing his lips ever so gently against mine in the predawn dark. The morning sun slides in slantwise through the filmy curtains. I get up to boil water and a small procession of dogs follows, sleepy and warm and smelling a little like baked bread, wet noses against my calves. I let them out; a few minutes later the red teakettle sings.

A few hours pass, then I'm in a small sleepy town lined with antique stores. The streets are sunlit and streaked with recent rain. I'm following the light down the road until I see a tiny building with too many sides. The front door is propped open- there's no electricity, only daylight and the just-right breeze that follows me in. 

It's perfect. The collection of old cassette tapes, the bright aprons, the way the whole building smells like the treehouse I grew up playing in. I tell the owner how lovely it is and she dips her head, smiling into her hands.

Then it's evening, and the house smells like the fragrant butternut squash warming on the stove, and our friends come in one by one- bringing pies, bringing bread, bringing another dog- and their voices crowd out the music playing in the corner. We have enough chairs for everyone, for once. 

We drive to the coast. Dinner by the sea. We walk the line where the ocean meets the land, my husband, his brother, and me. I'm certain the flash I see on the shore is a lighthouse until they point out it's a car, rounding the bend. We laugh, but I find myself remembering it as a lighthouse anyway. 

We hike in the rain. We play cards at night. We eat fish and chips, we walk along the boardwalk and track the croaking of the frogs as it rises and falls, rises again. On the day we leave the sun finally breaks out and we hike up to Cape Perpetua. The name means forever, and that was the word that stayed in my mind as we stood in the sun and looked out at the sea, stretching to eternity.

The next weekend, I was driving back from a trip with a group of friends. When we passed from a coastal tangle of trees into an open field, the largest flock of starlings I've ever seen lifted into the air at the same time. A murmuration, someone said. We watched for one long delicious moment until they disappeared behind another stand of trees.

After we came home I looked it up and learned that a  murmuration is a sign of change coming. 

I also learned that the headland we stood on wasn't named for forever. It was named for Saint Perpetua, a woman who died a senseless death at twenty-two, torn apart by beasts. She left her newborn son behind. It wasn't a monument to forever. It was a monument to things that ended so much sooner than you would have thought.

It doesn't make it sad. It only makes it more lovely. I watch Ivan laugh, the firelight passing over his face, and I picture him old. We drive by an orchard on the way home and I wonder if one day in the distant future someone will unearth part of our world and write about how this was once rich farmland, spotted with berry bushes and fruit trees, threaded with broad rivers and smaller chattering creeks.

The last stars will die out 120 trillion years from now. After that, the universe will be only black holes, drinking the deep, unimaginable power thrumming with no one to hear it. I read in an article somewhere that this, on a condensed timeline, is like having one second of starlight followed by one billion billion billion billion billion billion billion years of darkness. One billion seven times. It makes my molars ache.

This is the exception, not the rule- the light in late winter, the sea groaning its strange songs at night, the sweet discordance of a group of women laughing all at once. My husband's scratchy face against mine. The sun sitting low on the horizon as we walk by the creek. My mother's head on my shoulder. 

It's not exactly news, but every time I remember it I feel it again. Awe, fear, longing. Looking for a touchstone and thrilling to the fact that there isn't one. The very bedrock under our feet has never stopped moving. The sun will eat our world one day. The lighthouse that feels like your anchor in just a few moments shifts into another set of travelers wending their way home- here in one instant and gone the next, the light lancing forth into the dark sky above the sea.

We live in that one bright second, the article said. Just one second- a world of martyred women, murmurations, a planet taking one billion billion trips around an ancient star- and then, something else. 

And after that- who knows? But whatever wild or strange or wonderful or unimaginably lonely thing it may be- it won't be this.