Stars twinkled endlessly in your vision as you sat out on your porch one day, huffed at one of your last cigarettes and blew the smoke out into space.
But it was not necessarily day, nor necessarily night. Not when all you ever knew was the infinite universe around you. Stars, galaxies and planets stretched across the plane. The closest star to you was several million miles away, and had eight of its own planets that spun around it in orbits you could map out day to day.
But the concept of day and night was entirely human. It was an imaginary system to keep track of how often the green planet spun on its axis and around its own sun, and was no reflection of your own existence out here all alone.
You did not orbit a sun. You did not even orbit another planet. Your home, a sprawling two-story Victorian style house, first painted green when it was built, then slathered in a gaudy hue of peach (of which one can still see between the cracks of the bricks if she looks close enough) and then you painted it blue when you moved in, some one or two or three millennia ago.
A deep, shimmering blue so that the house might blend in with its environment. Any passing astronaut might have not even seen it, unless the light above your door was alit, and then she would have thought it was a star instead.
You imagined what a star felt like, what warmth felt like. What a day or a night even was.
Warmth filled your cheeks as you continued to puff at that cigarette. The smoke wafted through the air, or rather, lack of air, in one direction, perhaps to be soon captured into the atmosphere of this little planet of yours.
There was also an asteroid that had stopped, visited and promptly decided to orbit your house, of which you watched pass by your eyes on its usual route. You wondered from what planet it came from, and what collided with that planet so harshly to send a piece of itself so far into this neighborhood of your galaxy.
You lived on the edge on the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy. And you knew that because you had a globe.
And the globe sat in a study located right in the middle of the house, whose bookshelves stretched tall into this circular room. In the middle, an oak desk with a green table lamp of which you found yourself beneath often, lost in one of your many, many books.
The study was your beacon into the lives of those humans who lived on that swirling green planet. It was your only insight into what it was like to be human at all.
You figured you should have known what it was like to be human, yet you were as lost as that asteroid orbiting a two-story Victorian home on the edge of a galaxy outside where those humans even lived.
Perhaps they were peculiar anyway. They breathed air and drank water. And smoked these tiny rolls of tobacco that did not excite you as much as they should have, and left a dry taste in your mouth too.
You flicked the finished roll into space, watched it drift off in the direction its smoke had.
And you continued to drift through space.
