(7 hours before the universe dies)

Even with my thick raincoat on, I felt a freezing frost outside that crept down my neck and over my arms. It’d been freezing like this for about two months now… in the summer.

Our white dwarf slowly withering away left him colder and dimmer every day. It was a heartbreaking thing to witness, and not being able to do anything about it felt so… powerless…

Our house was just outside of the town. A peaceful spot with some woods behind us where we used to go camping with Lily back in the day.

We lived more or less isolated here. We didn’t really have any neighbors around. Just us living beside a dirt road, otherwise surrounded by open field and forest.

Town was more or less in walking distance from home. Sure, it took a while – 15ish minutes? – to get there, but it was very doable (though more so when we were younger).

I was walking towards the church. It was the center of town; surely she’d be around there somewhere… right?

Maybe she’d hid herself in there for some reason… She wasn’t so much religious, but in a time like this, who knows…? Maybe I’d see her waiting around for a shop to open, or sitting on a bench in the park, looking over a pond of ducklings that were left on the planet with us… or maybe…

Maybe it was just wishful thinking…

But that couldn’t stop me.

No. I was too determined to find her, today more so than any other day.

She was my wife, for crying out loud! I made her a promise to stand by her side always, to be there for her whether she needed me or not. I was not planning on breaking that promise.

She had to be around town somewhere. There was no reason for her to go out on her own otherwise. There wasn’t really anywhere else for her to go either…

Our town was dead. Completely and utterly dead.

The feeling was so bittersweet, going down the main road.

I was hit with a heartwarming feeling of nostalgia; a longing to the days of our youth. A vivacious town with people constantly roaming the streets, bringing forth a sense of happiness and community. The chilly hue of our white dwarf never felt so cold in our town.

But that feeling was at war with a bigger sense of heartbreak. The liveliness was gone, buried deep beneath the dust of time. Empty roads filled with an even dimmer blue from dwarfy than before, but with nothing to cheer it up now. It was frankly depressing to look at… which was definitely a feeling I wouldn’t have minded a lack of.

And that battle between the two raged on for my entire search throughout the town, my heart dropping with every step I took.

I couldn’t remember when they all left. Somewhere between yesterday and two weeks ago, that much I knew. Last time we visited was to stock up on food and water for the rest of dwarfy’s life. We might as well have been our baker’s last customers, or bought the very last packet of ramen noodles from our local grocery store. Maybe we were the last faces the priest saw before leaving his church behind forever, or the last people to get passed by a bus before its driver decided taking the rocket would be a wiser decision than hauling around the few people left in the town.

The priest had decided to keep the church unlocked after leaving. He wanted the “house of God to stay open for anyone wishing to spend more time on our planet than he, himself, had the courage for”. I suppose he didn’t have to fear for anything being stolen anymore with most people leaving… not that it mattered anymore regardless.

I was already weary from the trip (age hadn’t treated me well), but I found enough strength in the desire for my sweetheart to pull and push open the door of the church.

The sound of metal scraping against the stone steps outside echoed into the building, accompanied by grunts and groans of me putting my might to the test.

I ran in – for as much as I could still run – and called out her name again. But, like back home, my call was answered by my own echo and my own echo alone. The church was empty.

It was deafening and heart-shattering, that sound of utter silence following my desperate, wishful thinking.

I tried calling out again, but my voice cracked in the middle of it. I couldn’t.

I just… couldn’t.

I made my way outside again, aimlessly wandering around on the street near the building, desperately trying to calm down. She wasn’t at any stores, not in the church… Where would she be? Where could she still be? If she wasn’t in town, then where in the world could she have gone?

I was at a loss, and my eyes grew heavy, slowly filling up with tears.

I needed a break. I needed one moment to sit down and just break from all of it. To get my strength back, to get my mind clear and to get a grasp on where she could possibly be.

I made my way to the nearby bus stop and sat myself down on the bench. I held my head in my hands, trying to keep back the tears and the panic and the desperation that had jumped on me like a lion on its prey. I needed to calm down. If not for me, then for her. I made my mind wander to distant places, to parts of my memory in a time, probably long forgotten by anyone else.

This bus stop had stayed more or less the same since then. The paint had come off slightly, some metal parts had been rusting, and the glass was shattered to bits… and nothing of that was ever fixed, because nobody cared about this old, crooked bus stop.

But I did. Very much, even. You wouldn’t even believe how much a crooked bus stop could mean to a man.