Carly is in the same pale blue sun dress she's had on all day. Earlier, in the light of the afternoon, her shoulders had been bare to the sun, but the wind is stronger here at the top of Bushwell, so she's put on a navy cardigan.
"I like the way Japanese schoolgirls scrunch down their socks," she says, but she herself is wearing only low cut ankle socks inside a pair of ragged All Stars. Gravel bites into her bare calves where she sits, and her ankles are cold.
The city is quiet. It is the darkest hour of the night. Earlier, around 2, she had driven you over the Murrow Bridge in her Camry. The traffic was sparse on a weeknight, which meant she could slow down and you both could enjoy the moonlight rippling over the lake.
The wind pulses in her hair as she turns to you. The nights are cooler here and, even though you're closer to the ocean, drier than back in Texas, where the air on summer nights is like a dark gauze settling over the hill country. You fiddle with the zipper on your hoodie.
She tucks the corner of her lower lip under her incisor, narrows her eyes at you. "That TV preacher said the world is supposed to end this weekend. Tonight is supposed to be the last night in the world."
"Then it's a good thing we packed so much fun into this visit," you say.
You think back to earlier in the evening when the two of you went to the city park at sunset and tossed neon pink glowsticks across the darkening blue twilight. You chased each other down the hill and through the shadows. When the last glimmer of sunlight finally gave way to total darkness you both sat in the swings and counted shooting stars.
And then you think back to the emails and phone calls exchanged over these last long months, the late chat sessions online, all those long distance nights. Your heart lurches at the thought of going back to that, even though you love Texas and the fact that there are plenty of places to get barbecue ribs any time of the day or night.
She looks back out toward the skyscrapers in the distance. Overnight cleaning crews are in them, vacuuming offices and changing trash bags, you assume. There seems to be no order to how the offices are lit up - they're just random squares glittering out there in all that darkness.
"Sam?"
"Yeah, Carls?"
"I wish time would stop right now." She brushes a pebble off her knee. "This moment would be perfect if it would last forever."
You run your hand over her shoulder, lean in close to her. The wind mingles your thick blond curls with her fine black hair.
"If time stopped now, though, we wouldn't know if the world was gonna end or not," you say.
She hums, as if considering this.
You look out at the city, and ponder how there exist different qualities of light; there is the silvery kind, like the artificial luminance of the street lamps and office buildings you're now watching. Your favorite was always the 3:30 PM light, a sunshine vivid but softened that filtered through the leaves and fell along the sidewalks as you and her walked home from school on all those afternoons growing up, a transitional light somewhere between the sharp, hard shine of the mid-day and the dreamy, soft gold of late afternoon.
"We should never find out," she finally says as she leans her head into the crook of your shoulder. "Let it be a mystery. If we were in a movie, this would be the final scene."
The refrigerator hums, a drone in the stillness and quiet of the apartment. The tile in the kitchen is cold on your bare feet. The weak light of dawn is just enough to see what you're doing as you take ham and cheese out of the fridge and make a sandwich on the counter. Your whole body is dry and creaky from sleep deprivation, and even though Carly promised she would stay awake until you left, she is crashed out on the floor up in her bedroom, covered by the comforter you laid over her before you came downstairs.
And as you stand there in the stillness and quiet, eating loose shreds of ham, you suddenly are aware of a feeling. You look around, at the familiar furniture in the living room, at the dust motes hanging in the pockets of sunlight now spreading throughout the apartment like some counter to the shadows. You press your feet to the tile, to really feel the cold. How many dawns had you been the only one awake in this apartment? How many times had this same moment happened in those earlier, simpler years of growing up?
And even though in a few hours you will again be hurtling through the sky at supersonic speeds to go finish out the semester in the blinding Texas heat, even though you will be away from Carly again, you are not sad, and you are not afraid. You are so joyful that your body can barely contain it; you want to jump and scream that this is not the end of anything. This time is, instead, a transition too, just like all those afternoons walking home from school; a bridge to some new time, something yet to come, something soft and slightly mysterious.