“Can we meet this week?”

“I’m busy, why?”

“I’m going away. It’ll be a long time until I see you again.”

It was a Thursday when they met, the only day she could get into town. A Thursday. It seemed so insignificant and yet as if it couldn’t have been any other day. Only a week ago he’d realised his mistake, that things weren’t all okay, that things were going to change.

“You’re just nervous because of your new job.”

“Maybe,” he’d said. He missed her. He wondered if he shouldn’t have tried harder to make it work: Love is love after all, and absence makes the heart grow fonder, even if distance did its best to break it. Not that there was anything he could do about it now: he’d be gone in a few days and, besides, even if she wasn’t already with someone else (which she was), he’d hurt her too bad. He thought now of all the times she, Arietta, had sat alone, staring at the floor, at the walls, at the ceiling, wondering where she’d gone wrong, while he sat in his house, his parent’s house, writing, telling himself he was okay.

He knew now that he had betrayed her, and for what? Writing he supposed. Writing. His dream, his passion, his first love. It was writing that was dragging him halfway across the country, and his writing that would grow stronger for the pain he felt. He stared at a puddle, at the little intersecting ripples within it. Things might have been different and it might not have rained today.

“Good luck with your new job, I know you’ll do well with it.”

“Thanks,” he replied, “you’ve always been there for me. I wish I’d seen that sooner.”

“Yeah, well, we can’t change the past.”

“I know, but we’ll stay friends, won’t we?”

“Of course, we always said we would.”

Nearly two months later, and they were still close. Josh wanted the best for her, even if it hurt him, and Arietta accepted that, was happy for that, even if he had hurt her. But could they stay that way? Maybe not. He had already been away for two months, a sort of trial at the firm. Before he went they had been very much in love, but his doubts during those eight weeks away from home had all but killed their relationship. He felt that was understandable though; a necessary casualty. He was only twenty after all, too young to settle down long-term, long-distance.

Arietta had believed there was hope for their relationship. Not forever, but for a while longer. It wouldn’t have been too much trouble for her to come down once in a while and visit in between her university work and her part-time job. She always had had more faith than Josh though, and that was one of his problems, and she had told him so.

Trouble was, Josh thought, it was so difficult to know what to believe nowadays. No one really had any faith in the Government, hadn’t for years, and the media hadn’t helped that. With the Internet the love of your life could be just a click away, but so could a psychotic stalker, or another false hope. And even science couldn’t be trusted, Indian-giving the Trojan horse of medical advancement in exchange for the God that, less than a hundred years ago, every one of us could have turned to for support and guidance. He had been the truth back then, just as science was now, but at least His followers hadn’t felt the need to rewrite scripture every time a new discovery was made. Back then the facts had been changed, denied even, to fit the evidence, but now the evidence was in a constant state of flux, dragging the facts along with them, until the confused followers were left scrabbling for meaning in the dust that the scientists, our new priests, left in their wake.

Perhaps Josh shouldn’t be worrying about this, perhaps these were problems too big for one person to bother with, especially when he had smaller ones, perceived or actual, of his own. For example, Arietta would be seeing Tom tonight. He was the future and, now that she had left him on this park bench, Josh was the past. Arietta had met Tom on her university course, back in September. Josh had been away then, working and, although he was certain Arietta’s intent had never strayed any further than friendship, now that Josh had left her, they were together. They would probably spend Christmas together, exchanging gifts, sending text messages while they were with their families. That had been Josh’s place once, but now his place was far away, on his own for most of the holiday in a foreign place, presumably, until he came back for those few days at home.

It bothered him that he felt jealous of Tom, especially since he genuinely wanted Arietta to be happy, with or without him. It bothered him too that she hadn’t returned his kiss, an innocent, friendly peck on the cheek, when they had hugged before she left. Not that he could expect her to, but she might have done, just to be friendly, just to give him something to remember her by. Instead he had received a hurried affirmation that they would remain friends and a hasty wave goodbye as she ran to make her next class, just as it started to drizzle. And would they remain friends? Why should they? They would talk, certainly, online, perhaps even on the phone from time to time, but what kind of friendship would it be when they might never meet again because he was so rarely in her part of the world and she had already moved on anyway?

His cheek felt bare. Cold, even. He wasn’t just sad at her leaving, or just nervous for his new job. He was almost looking forward to that even. It was a more a deep yet vague sense of hopelessness, a feeling that he was lost and alone, that he would never be able to read people or talk about nothing with them, that he would never feel normal emotions without questioning them. Why this? Why that? Why am I sad, why am I happy, how I could be happier, what even is ‘happiness’?

He had been happy a few times, he realised, but only retrospectively. With Arietta for example, even though he had only realised on rare occasions that there was nothing more he had wanted, he had generally been happy, or at least contented, even if he only realised that a few weeks after he broke up with her. It was all so confusing. He had a feeling she had been happy with him too; she had told him so often enough, at least. But he had always wondered how, questioned why. He had never known if he was saying the right thing or just boring her. And what did her and Tom talk about now? What did normal people in a relationship say to each other? What did anyone say to each other?

He looked up. A man of reasonable age had sat on a bench opposite him. Josh might talk to the man if only it was socially conventional, if only he had anything to say. Instead, Josh would most likely end up like the man, old and sitting on park benches in the rain, no different to when he was twenty. And what would it matter? What did any of it matter, any of these things that people said to each other, any of the plans they made or the things they did? What did it matter if people broke up, or if people stayed together and got married and reproduced and lived out their days in blissful contentedness? We were all going to the same place anyway, whether we went there one by one having fettered our lives away, or all in one go following some great catastrophe such as a comet hitting the Earth, or a nuclear war.

With that view, Josh reasoned, it shouldn’t matter that Arietta hadn’t kissed him, or that she was with someone else. It shouldn’t matter how many girls he’d kissed or how many he never would. It shouldn’t matter how many or of what quality any of the relationships he formed in this life were. It did though, or at least it mattered to him, if no one else save for a handful of his close friends and family, and why should it be any other way? It hadn’t for anyone else, for any of the untold billions of people who had lived and died and left no trace behind apart from some bones and some memories, both of which would fade away in time.

There were a few who had left something more behind; the writers and the revolutionaries, the philosophers and the great scientists. They had all gained a semi-immortality, of sorts. Josh felt he could do that, one day, with all these thoughts, if he could focus them in to one good book that would live on after him. Not that that would do him a lot of good: he’d be dead and this life, if the cult of Science was to be believed, is the only one.

The old man stood up with a cursory glance at Josh and proceeded on his way. Even the best of books though, Josh realised gloomily, were subject to changes in fashion and ideologies, just as their pages were subject to mildew and dry rot. Even if books began being edited and updated and computer hard-drives replaced paper, one ferocious electrical storm would see them all off, no matter how long men held onto them, and that was assuming the human race survived long enough to do so.

After all, there was always the possibility of a comet. And if not that, nuclear war, which had been grimly predicted since before the nineteen-fifties. It wasn’t likely of course: it hadn’t happened yet because we were all too resistant to change and, since almost no one could find the time or energy to save the planet, the climate, ourselves, why should anyone go out of their way to blow us all up instead? If anything can be learned from the human race, it’s that we’d much rather kill ourselves by degrees; slowly at first and then ever-increasingly, choking up the Earth until there was no food left to eat and no air left to breathe. Of course, Josh accepted, he could be wrong: It was always possible that some religious fanatic or some power-crazed dictator might press a button and wipe us all out without ever giving the universe a sufficient enough chance to put us out of our misery.

A half hour had passed since Arietta had left and Josh had begun thinking so fatalistically. The world would end one day of course, and now that end was a half-hour closer. But who knew how much further was left to go? Any great disaster might happen tomorrow and then whether Josh had written a book or not, formed a new relationship or won Arietta back, wouldn’t matter because, even if there were any books left when the end came, who would be left with the time to read them? Josh stood up. Today might be the last day he or anyone else had on Earth, or it might just be another insignificant rainy Thursday. With neither of those possibilities any more likely than the other, he may as well get on with his life and make it matter, if not just for himself, then for the people who would come after and read the book he would write.