We kept missing the aurora borealis. The once-in-a-lifetime just kept appearing. Like, so what? It-just-so-happened-she-was-alive-and-breathing. The sky gave way to Instagram's more vivid purples. I sent flowers to everyone I was ghosting. Surely you heard their misconceptions falling apart. Spine felt like starlight: vertebral glitter. Light scattered randomly, if not for physics. Your text: Doesn’t matter. Love you. There was a sudden illumination on the camera screen. The it-just-so-happened-I-was-there-to-take-her-pulse. We all believed in the afterlife for 10 seconds. Anyway, then we pulled out our bucket lists and crossed off aurora, even though we never really saw it. It was just the sky, after all. The belief came second: that it all amounted to more than plasma, then pixels, on a phone screen. That if we looked closely enough, we could see who we were becoming.
