It is in the early morning light that Damian climbs onto the rooftop of a school he’s never heard of before and shouts the words, “Hear me, fellow extraterrestrials!” as loud as his lungs will let him.

“I realized something was wrong with the world when minimum wage was determined by whether someone pees standing up or sitting down! When people discriminated against others, depending on how much melanin one did or didn't have in their skin! When we weren’t allowed to love who we wanted to because love, in certain cases, was apparently bad, sinful, and against God’s will… whatever that means!”

In the stairs leading to the very same roof, a young woman pauses upon hearing Damian’s voice booming past the half-open, bright red door. She cannot comprehend it, how someone has arrived before her. This has never happened—not even once—during her one-thousandth and ninety-five streak of her visiting this place every day before her classes begin.

“What I mean by that, fellow extraterrestrials, is that I don’t want to live on this planet anymore—” Damian glances upward, to a pink sky that has started to appear thanks to the sun’s help. “Take me!” he yells, with open arms. “I’ll let you do whatever you want! Probe me, friends, mark me as a traitor to the human race, but please, don’t leave me here, to waste away in our own pollution!”

The young woman considers turning back. Her legs tremble. Her knees jerk. It’s cold. She regrets wearing a skirt, even if it’s long. But she knows she can’t escape this—her daily trip—for she believes that if she were to skip it, she would die.

She marches on and opens the door, fully.

The young man, who’d been professing his love for aliens, still has his back turned to her. He hasn’t heard her footsteps, yet. It occurs to Aoi how easy it would be to push him off when he isn’t holding onto the railings at all. But the girl is no murderer, and she certainly isn’t about to become one on her eighteenth birthday.

Damian turns around. Despite having screamed so loudly, he finds himself surprised to see someone before him.

Aoi expects him to be embarrassed.

He isn’t. He seems happy. Is happy.

“Holy shit.” Damian’s opal eyes light up like a billion stars. He gasps. “It actually worked!” His unkempt, brown curls make him look like a scientist—not the crazy kind, but the intelligent, and a little mad kind.

He takes a step forward. He asks her, “Can you tell me what galaxy you’re from? Are you friendly? Or… did you just come here to take my organs for research? Damn, your human costume is really well made.”

In a strange way, Aoi feels sorry for the first time in her life, that she isn’t from another planet. “I didn’t come here for you, and I’m not an alien,” she mutters, while passing him by and stopping once she reaches the edge of the rooftop.

She almost missed it by a few seconds—the sunrise. It makes her uneasy. It makes her want to cry, not out of sadness, but out of relief, because it means that she will get to live another day.

There is a long pause on Damian’s end.

Aoi wonders if he might not just walk away. And he does, in fact, walk—though, it is in her direction, and not a step back. “You sure?” he asks her, instead of apologizing.

It shouldn’t take Aoi as long as it does for her to answer, “I’m sure.” Yet, she can’t help it. Sometimes, it does happen for her to feel like she doesn’t belong. Maybe he’ll go away now, the thought clings to her like roots do to the soil.

Damian doesn’t.

“You’re not going to kill yourself, are you?” he speaks the question in a tone that could have very well been that of a child requesting ice cream.

Aoi finally turns to look at him. He’s close—closer to her than she expected, and it is only now that she notices the faint, beauty mark smack dab in the middle of his nose. “No,” she tells him, with a brief, shake of her head. “I came here to survive.”