Always Human
in which two strangers meet through particular circumstances
I met her at the edge of the world.
She sat with her feet dangling over the Edge, the place where the stars touched the earth.
I’d almost tripped when I saw her. From the distance, she looked like a marble statue, the ivory glow of the moon softening the edges of her silhouette, turning her hair into the colour of winter snow. No, not a statue, I thought as I approached, squinting into the darkness. A ghost.
Perhaps foolishly, I thought of my father.
“Guǐ” he called them in his stories. “Stay away, Leo. They linger between the dead and living, hoping to lure you over with their silver words. Don’t tempt them. Don’t go further than the third willow tree. ”
Don’t fall off the Edge, is what he means, but he doesn’t say it.
I walked up the winding dirt path, stumbled over the haphazardly placed caution signs and past the third willow tree. Its long limbs reached towards the night sky, branches brushing against the silver stars.
I took the last few steps slowly, my legs trembling. In the darkness, it was hard to tell exactly where the ground below gave way to the deep abyss, or The Nothing, as the scientists had coined it. I stopped a few steps away, half expecting her to disappear at the faintest breath of wind.
When she didn’t, I let out a breath, and not quite knowing why, reached for the camera slung across my shoulders and snapped a picture.
At the sound of my footsteps, she turned and stood with a quick, careless motion that made my heart thud in my chest. There was no hesitation, no concern for the awning blackness below; she never once looked down. I watched, half in awe, half in horror.
“Aren’t you afraid of falling?” I blurted, casting a look over the edge. The darkness pressed up, suffocating my body like a damp, musty, thick blanket, clinging to every inch of my skin. My legs trembled, and I tore my gaze away. The drop was infinite, but you didn’t need science to tell you that; I had once thrown pebbles over the edge, straining for hours to listen for the plink that never came. That was years ago, and I shivered now, imagining the pebble still in its endless fall.
She tilted her head. Considered. Her gaze was piercing, as if considering me, more than the question itself.
“No,” she answered simply. Her eyes glittered in challenge. “Are you?”
“Who isn’t?”
“Then why are you here?” She was closer now, and I could make out the freckles that dusted her cheeks and the cigarette between fingers painted with chipped nail polish.
I gestured vaguely to the drop. “I wanted to see if what they were saying was true.”
“That the Nothing is eating up the Earth?”
“That the ground is falling away,” I corrected, more sharply than I’d meant to.
She shrugged, unabashed, and took a drag from her cigarette. Her red hair gleamed, molten gold, under the ivory light.
“It’s true,” she finally answered, and blew smoke at the stars. “See for yourself.”
I took a step forward, and my breath caught in my throat. It was one thing to hear about Earth’s inevitable doom from scientists in white lab coats and cold, measured numbers, but seeing it was something else entirely. In the glow of the moonlight, I could see the dirt crumbling a few meters from where we stood, like sand slipping through an hourglass, falling into the maw of the abyss below. I looked down, my hand brushing over the dirt below my feet. How long before this, too, would be gone? Years? Months? I imagined my father and I, fleeing inland. And our doom marching towards us, as constant as the stars above. How long?
You don’t have forever, the dark below sang as it kissed up to my skin, holding me close. There was a gravity to it that made it impossible to tear my gaze away.
“We don’t have forever,” I repeated, imagining the seconds pouring off me, seeping from my skin and counting down to the inevitable, endless fall.
“No,” she agreed, softly.
The moments that define lives aren’t always obvious. They aren’t always protracted, heavy with meaning — mine certainly wasn’t; it was the moment I first saw her, mistaking her for the ghosts in my father’s stories, and it was the quiet moment where she paused, before sitting down next to me.
“I’m Lyla,” she said, her gaze forward. Smoke curled from her lips as she exhaled, shifting like ghosts in the breeze.
“Leo.”
What a sight we must’ve been, the pair of us, sitting on the edge of the world, watching our doom together.
~~
That night, when the moon had dipped low into the horizon and I’d walked back home, I pulled out my camera and looked at the picture I’d hastily taken. It captured the bold, sweeping lines of her face: the tilt of her chin, and, wonderfully, the fearlessness in her gaze as she stared down, down, down. Such a girl was she, I thought, who looked at doom with both eyes open.
I thought of my father, who had listened to the news speak of our crumbling earth, our inevitable doom, with hollow, unbelieving eyes. In my room, I listened to the sound of his footsteps as he drifted from room to room, always moving but never towards anything. It was as if he was making his own disappearance, becoming the guǐ he once warned me of.
But Lyla — she was the opposite. I brushed a thumb over the screen, in equal parts awe and envy.
~
Unspoken, our ritual continued.
I made my way up the winding trail each night, accompanied by the song of cicadas and the cereus that bloomed along the path, their white petals turned towards the night.
Without fail, I would find her on the precipice – the same, easy grin, cigarette in hand, and legs dangling over the edge. Sometimes, we would talk. Other times, we stayed silent and watched until the brilliant golden hues bled like fire and the first slivers of sun appeared.
But always, always, I heard the dark whisper its promise to us, gloating over its victory — our doom.
The earth below us continued to crumble; the Edge was at the third willow tree now. People had begun to flee inland, and the streets were cold and desolate — a ghost city, the streetlights blinking softly for an audience of one.
You don’t have forever.
~
Lyla was elusive. She was like the flitting shadow of an elf owl, impossible to pin down. In my mind, I tried to capture her in a single image, but the edges would come out blurred, never truly her.
Once, as we listened to the song of the nightingale, she told me she couldn’t sleep for thinking about all the things she wanted to see — the midnight sun, and its opposite, the polar night. Her voice was strained with yearning as she spoke of blue lagoons and grand canyons, the things that would soon be no more.
“Why don’t you go?”
She brushed her fingertips over the blades of grass. She didn’t speak for a long time, but when she finally did, her voice was quiet, her face moonlit with sadness. “It’s easier to mourn when you have less to lose.”
I thought of my father then, how he had become a wisp of his former self. And softly, not quite knowing why, I said:
“My father once told me a story about ghosts.”
The words came easier after that, the story spilling from my lips. When I finished, Lyla said nothing. She looked far away then, her expression suffused with sepia hues of nostalgia, with iridium music.
That night, I dreamed of Lyla as a nightingale, brown wings spread wide underneath the velvet blue sky.
~
When the ground had crumbled past the third willow tree, the growing abyss only mere meters from my house, my father looked me in the eye and said:
“We’re going.”
I had known this was coming — it was the only option, the only choice, and yet my heart sank. I looked at our house, the little brownstone with its nicked wooden floors and shelves overflowing with books. Everything I’d ever known was tucked between these walls. I traced the grooves on the kitchen table and looked out the window to the empty streets.
“When?”
“Tomorrow."
I took my camera and slipped out of the house.
Lyla came just as the sun had begun to slip below the horizon. She looked at me, and she must’ve seen it in my face; her easy expression fell, replaced with something solemn.
“You’re going,” she said, quietly. More of a statement than a question.
I nodded, and she tilted her head back, as if drinking in the sky.
“Where?”
“Inland.”
She nodded, and settled to her usual spot — at the very Edge, her face turned towards the setting sun.
“I’m leaving too.”
“Where to?”
“To the blue lagoons, the crystal caves, the grand canyons. Everywhere, really.” She looked at me. “Want to come?”
It was a halfhearted question — we both knew I had to stay with my father. But for a fleeting moment, I considered saying yes. I imagined walking through the grand canyons, the endless blue above my head, the doom far from my sight.
I shook my head. “Send me a postcard, though?”
She smiled. “I can do that.”
And between one breath and the next, I found myself by her side, my shoulder beside hers, our feet hanging over the Edge. I saw the darkness spread below us, but this time, I didn’t imagine it reaching for us, hungry for our doom. I saw it as it was, just deep, inky black — a pool of infinity below our feet.
She turned to me, the surprise in her face mirroring mine. She placed a hand on my cheek. Her touch was light, like a butterfly’s and we sat there for what felt like both an eternity and no time at all.
“Oh Leo,” she whispered as the ivory moon cast us in its glow. “It’ll be okay.” And they were not the words of an oracle or a prophet, but somehow, I was comforted. She did not mean that we were not frightened, or that we will not hurt and love and be loved. Only that we have each other; we have now. We have this fleeting moment accompanied by the song of cicadas and nightingales and the faint scent of cereus drifting in the breeze.
"Lyla?"
I undid the clasp of my camera strap and placed the old polaroid her hands. The absence of it was strange; my hands felt impossibly light without its weight, but in that moment, it had felt right. I imagined the lenses capturing everything Lyla would see — a collection of memories, every detail in its finest glow.
Sure, I was sending it away, perhaps never to see it again, but I knew better. What traveled forward could always come back.
She held it in her hands, cradled it like a newborn baby.
"Thank you."
That was the last I saw of Lyla
~
Two months later, in a city far from the edge of the world, I found a postcard in the mailbox.
It was a snapshot of her, and in the backdrop, a lagoon so impossibly blue that it took my breath away. Her red hair was tousled, her grin lopsided, and the picture was blurry — no doubt taken hastily. But it was beautiful, capturing everything wild and fierce about her. There was a single word on the back, scrawled in deep blue. Now. And strangely, impossibly, it was enough. I tried not to laugh, but mostly not to cry.
That night, I placed it carefully beside the first photo I'd taken.
Sometimes, in my dreams, I wander up the winding path and look at our doom head on, with both eyes open. As the dark kisses my skin, I pause and listen for the sweet song of the nightingale. In those moments, my thoughts stray to Lyla — how our paths touched for the briefest moment. I think of her, on her own adventure, and think of that picture I’d taken. Not a marble statue. Not a ghost, nor the guǐ of my father’s stories. Not a bird. Not untouchable. She was just a girl. Only, and always, human.
My fingertips brush over the photo now, and I can almost hear her voice inside my head. We don’t have forever.
No. But we have now.
And maybe, maybe, that was enough.
END