For a few moments, they stood on the driveway. Matthew reached for Pat's hand. "Look at that," he said, gesturing up at the sky. "We don't often see that in town, do we? All that?"
The sky was a dark, black velvet, rich and deep, studded here and there with small points of starlight, one or two of which seemed to burn with great intensity.
"No," she said. All those yellow streetlights. Light pollution."
.... "Whenever I look up there," he said, "I think the same thing. I think of how small we are and our all our concerns, our anxieties and all the rest of it, are so irrelevant, so tiny. Not that we think they are -- but they are, aren't they?"
She looked at him. "I suppose they are."
"And I also think of how we make one another miserable by worrying about these small things, when we should really just hug one another and say thank you to somebody, to something, for the great privilege of bring alive -- when everything up there is cold and dead. Dead stars. Collapsing stars. Suns that are going out, dying."
She was silent. She wanted to say to him: "I think so too." But she did not.
The World According to Bertie: A 44 Scotland Street Novel (4)
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