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She looks like she was built for disappearing, and I keep standing in the way of it.

“I’m surprised,” I finally replied.

“Why?”

I shrug as she takes a long drag before passing it to me. “You usually disappear on weekends.”

Her expression changes and a small smile appears on her lips, “Apparently not this time.”

I don’t know how long we stay like that, sharing a cigarette, then another one. She looks thoughtful and confused even if the silence doesn’t seem to make her uncomfortable.

“Do you think smells can trigger you?” She asks, looking at me.

I turn my head slightly. “What do you mean?”

Her shoulders lift in a shrug before she speaks again, “Scents… Can they…I don’t know. Bring back things? Bad memories or feelings?”

She looks away and whispers, “It sounds stupid.”

I watch her for a moment, trying to understand what she’s not saying and reply, “It’s not stupid.”

My hand moves before I think about it, reaching to her jaw and gently bringing her face back to me. “Sometimes your body remembers things before your mind does.” Her eyes soften and I pull my hand back. “You don’t have to explain it to me before you’re ready. But know that I’m here.”

She sighs, as if this wasn’t important. But it is to me. Somehow, without making any sense, her feeling this way is important to me.

“You don’t have to perform okay around me,” I say as she looks back at me.

A laugh with no humor comes out of her mouth. “I don’t know how to.”

“Then fail at it, I can take that.”

The conversation ends without really ending. She doesn’t offer more than that and I don’t push. Instead, she opens her sketchbook. I watch as she finds the unfinished drawing from days ago, the one she started here. Her pencil moves slowly across the page, adding lines to the flower that had been waiting for her.

“Why do you like it here?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer immediately. She rarely does when a question demands her to be honest about how she feels. Instead, she looks out at the horizon, where the line between the ocean and the sky has almost disappeared.

The sketchbook closes immediately after, as if she wasn’t in the mood for being creative tonight. Her gaze is fixed on the same invisible spot when she talks again, “The cliffs?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s nothing underneath our feet,” she says eventually. “And there’s nothing above us either. Only sky and water.”

I follow her gaze and for a moment I don’t know how I feel with her like this, opening herself up to the person she should push away.

“Yeah.” A useless answer, because I don’t know what else to say, and because I strangely understand it more than I want to.

There is something comforting about standing somewhere that reminds you the world is larger than whatever you carry inside yourself. For a few minutes, the past becomes quieter. The things you regret, the things you lost, the people you couldn’t save; they all feel impossibly far away.

Then she speaks again, “Do you know we’re made of stardust?” I stare at her with a confused look. “Isn’t that fascinating?” She continues as she looks upward. “Everything that makes us who we are came from something that existed before us. The elements in our bodies were created inside stars. Stars that lived for billions of years, then died, and somehow what they left behind became something else.” She pauses, her eyes moving back toward her hands. “Us.”

I’ve heard the phrase before. Everyone has.

We’re made of stardust.

As if the universe has spent billions of years taking things that were ending and finding another purpose for them.

I have spent most of my life believing the opposite. Things break, and sometimes they stay broken. Believing that there are things you lose that do not come back no matter how much you wish they would.