Day by day, they wandered, and every sunset their home.

The stars had become familiar to them, the only consistency outside of each other. Every new face in every new place offered the same darting glances, passing over like mindless whispers of clouds, unlike the ones they loved to watch so sleeplessly.

They found a place beneath a bridge along the banks of a brown river. The passing moans of vehicles loomed overhead, and then faded away. She thought it should be a painting, and so she painted it. He stood by and tossed pebbles into the water, watching the ripples spread, seeing how far they could reach. When she was finished, she left it there in the sand without a name, and they moved on.

Beneath the moon they laid together, bare, yet warm, with the embers of a quiet fire wandering about them. He looked at her, and she looked at him, and they wondered why the Moon didn’t have a name. They named it Luna, and then Maria, with a laugh. In the end, though, they took it back; they decided the Moon didn’t need a name. And, so, they enjoyed its company until it, too, fell asleep.

Kindly, their old friend woke them with an enveloping warmth. They packed their things and moved on. Along the way, a corn field appeared, and so they ran through it with the hope they’d get lost. She went one way, and he another, turning where they wanted in their own maze where no one else could find them – not even each other. Through it all they could faintly hear each other’s laughs and calls, until, at the end, they found each other once again.

An old face on an old man stood by the road with an old camera. He asked if he could take their picture, and they said yes. They held each other and smiled–a moment, and the old man captured it. He asked for their names and where they lived. They said they had none and everywhere.

The Moon came and went, as summer turned into fall, and fall into winter, and they enjoyed each other’s company until the day the Moon came to find them, but they weren’t there anymore.

And in the trails of where they roamed, they were never seen again, except for in an old home, in an old picture of an old moment.

* * * * *

They stood, still, overlooking their new home. And it was cold.

The stars were unfamiliar to them, the moon a bit further away than the one they knew, the dying sun old and tired. All that remained of what use to be resided in capsules and pictures of a place far away–ghosts that haunted them now in this new, strange place.

Across the barren landscape of ice and snow, they mapped the stars and the land. They had little to say to each other, except configurations and considerations of the mechanics of the new earth they walked amongst and the new air they breathed. They returned to their shelter before nightfall. He went to his section, and she went to hers.

The next day came. Then the next. She knew what he had to do, the calculation neither of them wished to consider, and so she let him into her bed. Avoiding each other’s eyes, the unfamiliar face of the moon passed over them, like a whisper of an old, ghostly cloud.

Desperately, they waited for the winter to pass, but quickly they realized it was not a season, and there was no change. Frozen, they sat by the remnants of a fire, now ash, and watched the old sun falter behind the horizon. She went to her section, and he to his, and then the moon.

A singular record played in their space, a collection of sounds and whispers of a foreign comfort. Children chuckled, audiences cheered, and music was played. There was thunder, and then there was rain. Oceans crashed against the land, and crickets chirped in the forests of brushing leaves in whispering winds. Speakers spoke, poems were read, and the world was painted in singular, calculated words and noises.

Breaking their silence, they spoke on their calculations of the present moment. Between their sketches and theories, they found a hole–one in which there was no end, nor a beginning. This place was not their home, they knew, and they were not each other’s. Comatose and cold, the mechanics of their bodies strived for more, desperately longing for a place it could not recall, while their minds lingered in singular moments of a fading time.

They let the cold take them one night. The moon watched, then, again, passed them over.