We are made of stardust, and the moon keeps all of the oceans breathing, and the sun rises over the same roof gable it did last year when I was up all night just like this, shivering and empty and crying on the same couch because the stars in me only want to turn back into dust.

I know, you say on the early morning cab ride across town, which means more than just I know, which means I love you, and if only, and be here anyway, so I lean my head against your chest while all the joggers and dog walkers and old-money brick and iron flow past the window like a screensaver of other people's lives, or else like a movie only we get to see, just today, just this once.

We are on our way to the hospital because of a glitch in my code, a pull in my fabric, always about to tear. I know the whole universe is riddled with holes, some perhaps undetectable, small as atoms and heavy as mountains. Primordial, they are called, formed when everything else began. Pinpricks of darkness amidst even more dark. Every now and then, a scatter of light.

Like last year, the nurses will rupture the veins in my hands before agreeing to stick an elbow, but it won't be like that one year when the drugs seeped out of the IV and burned through muscle, waking me with terrors instead of anesthesia dreams. It won't be like that other year when they nicked an artery and I went home with one arm bandaged too stiff to bend, so that later when you helped me in the shower, I laughed like a person come back from the dead each time your calluses snagged in my gossamer-fine hair.

Sometimes, I wonder how other people mark their calendars. I mean besides birthdays. Or deathdays. Besides weddings, Christmas, Yom Kippur. All those private anniversaries of joy and grief we can't help but revisit on our own little orbits around the sun.

Sometimes, I wonder how life counted time back when it was barely life. After it had tried and failed and tried and failed and finally tried and not failed to gain a foothold on this planet, before there were plants or animals, back in those three billion blue-green years of shallow seas and itty bitty cells softly burping oxygen up towards the sky, towards a sun they couldn't see but maybe could sense, like a warm hand cradling your shoulder while you sleep.

This year, like every year, we will go home and nap and eat dumplings from the place that somehow delivers even though we live so far outside their radius, our apartment might as well be on the moon. Later, after the dishes are done, I might pause at the sink, watching the last few soap bubbles shimmer their tiny, iridescent worlds before they each go pop pop pop, and think, That's how life kept trying to become life. Next year, I might think, glitches, or the year after that, chances. Every once in a while, I'll think, Look how brief. Oh, look how beautiful.

And you will come stand behind me, wrapping your arms around my waist, laughing when I spin and dry my hands all over your shirt. And for a little while, I won't mind so much that there is a bit of death at the heart of each of us, the way there is a black hole at the center of every galaxy, a dark well of gravity to keep all that light awhirl, all those stars turning into dust, all that dust maybe turning back into stars someday.


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