Sometimes, I wonder if you remember the day we first met. We were five, and you had just moved in next door to me. My parents dragged me out of the house to meet you and your family, and give you a box of chocolates as a welcoming gift. Your father couldn’t eat them, since he was allergic, and your mother didn’t live with you, so my parents bent down and handed you the box. Moments later, you had grabbed my hand and pulled me off to your bedroom, determined to bond over praline with your new best friend. The chocolates were nothing special. The bonding… now, that was the part that got me.

We ran through questions like it was some kind of marathon. Favorite color? Well, back then, you liked blue. Best TV show? We had an argument over whether Digimon or Hi-Five was better—that was pretty much the only fight you ever lost. You were always the smarter one, and the more patient one. You could debate your way out of anything, even when you were five.

When our conversation was coming to an end, I pushed the final question into the foray.
“Whaddaya wanna do when you’re grown up?” You turned to me, totally straight faced, and told me:
“I want to go into space,”
“What, like an astro—astro—uh… astro-no-maut?” You shook your head, and smiled.
“I just want to go into space and never come back,” That meant nothing to me at the time. Now, I realize that you were just lonely. My dreams made even less sense, I guess.
“Oh. Okay. I want to live forever!” You didn’t get a chance to reply. My parents dragged me off home moments later.

It feels like we spent every day until we were ten hanging around each other. You helped me with schoolwork, and watched cheesy TV shows with me. I played rugby by myself in your backyard and got your washing covered in mud way too often. I don’t think your father liked me too much after his clean white sheets ended up permanently brown.
“Ethan,” He’d say, waggling his finger in my face. “Please, try to avoid the washing next time.” Soon there’d be a roar from the car as he drove off to Smith and Cougheys to buy a replacement duvet. Never let it be said that your father was a cheap man.

A few days before I turned ten, he came over to my house, and told my parents he’d been transferred to the Brazilian branch of his company. You were both leaving, and you didn’t know if you’d ever be back. On my birthday, you and your father dragged me to Newmarket to buy me something.
“Anything in this mall,” Your father told me. “Within reason, of course.” His wallet was open and his smile was wide. I wasn’t sure if it was in joy at the prospect of his sheets never being sullied by dirt again, or if he genuinely cared about me. While we were wandering around, your eye caught on a set of bracelets in the window of a jeweller’s.
“Look, Ethan,” You whispered, hands pressed up against the glass. “Aren’t they gorgeous?” Yuck, I had thought. Why would I want a bracelet? But despite my thoughts, I played along and agreed to go into the shop and look at them with you. You were enamored with them—all silver, made of tiny chain links with half of a heart on the end of each.
“Get out the money my dad gave you,” I pulled it out of my pocket slowly, looking at you curiously. “I have a plan.”
“Aww, Suzie, you’re not buying those bracelets, are you?”
“Look, it won’t use up all the money,” You were certain that those bracelets were a good idea. Looking back, you were right.
“… Fine. Buy the stupid bracelets,” I folded my arms and turned away, while you pointed them out to the shop assistant, and paid for them. Within minutes, you were back at my side, handing me the bag.
“You keep both of them. And then when I get back to New Zealand, I’ll take my half off you,” It sounded like something out of a movie.
“Doesn’t it usually go the other way around?” I asked you. “Like, people take a bracelet each, and then—“
“Pfft, you’d never make any effort to bring them back together,” Damn straight. “You’ve just got to wait for me here.”

I don’t remember much of the rest of that week, except for the fact that, at the end of it, you left. The next seven years were a blur. For a while, I pretended the bracelets didn’t exist. They got buried in my drawer, beneath old reports and knick-knacks. It wasn’t until I moved across town to Howick that I dug them out and—god, what was I thinking?—started wearing them. When I started going to high-school there, all the guys called me a fag ‘cause I wore those damn bracelets everywhere. The girls thought it was sweet, though, so I ended up with a fair few female friends. Never a girlfriend, though. The bracelets marked me as someone else’s property… or something like that. Some girl in Brazil was waiting to come back home and claim me as her trophy. Now that everything’s said and done, I think I’m happy you marked me as out-of-bounds.

When I was halfway through year twelve, I got a call.
“Hello?” It started off like normal.
“Hey, I’m Suzie Peyton-Sutcliff, and I was wondering if there’s an Ethan—“ Then got progressively more extraordinary.
“Suzie!” I exclaimed. You had a bit of an accent from your time away, but nothing much.
“Ethan, is that you?” I fiddled with my bracelets, suddenly very excited.
“Yeah! I’m guessing this call means you’re back in NZ?”
“Well duh. Look, I need to get my bracelet off you… Are you free on Sunday?”

When I went to school that Monday, I only had one bracelet, and only half of my heart. I had given the rest to you.

Even though we were living on opposite sides of town then—you, in our old suburb of Devonport, and me out east in Howick—we managed to see each other no less than once a week. Usually in town, since it was a good half-way point for both of us, but sometimes we ventured out to each other’s houses. Your father still seemed wary of me, and my parents still thought you were absurdly sweet. It was all going perfectly. But no road comes without potholes.

“What do you mean, you’re dying?” If there was any emotion I felt then, it was anger, even though it wasn’t mum’s fault she had gotten sick.
“Ethan, please, calm down,” My father massaged my mother’s hand, both of them staring at me with shimmering eyes, bordering on tears.
“No! Don’t tell me to calm down, dad!”
“Ethan, there’s treatment she can take, and she might be just fine,”
“Yeah—might be. There’s nothing definitive about that,” I stormed out. It took three buses to get me to Devonport, and when I arrived, it was about ten o’clock at night. You opened the door in your pajamas, with your hair in curlers

We both cried for far too long that night. Somewhere between the tears, we found chances to make conversation.
“I-I don’t want mum to die,” I had croaked.
“I don’t want her to die either. She’s like family to me,”
“Hey, Suzie,”
“What?”
“… You still wanna be alone in space?” You went silent for a worrying length of time.
“… No. Never. Do you still want to be immortal?” In between gasps for air, I shook my head. “I didn’t think so.”
“It’d be so lonely. Watching everyone you love die… I’d never wish that on anyone,” Neither of us spoke for what felt like hours.
“… I’m going to find a cure,” You eventually said.
“What?”
“… I’m going to find a way to cure your mother. Someday.”

Whatever treatment they stuck mum through, it didn’t work. Barely a year after she was diagnosed, she was in a coffin, six feet under. At the funeral, you stood at the back, impassive, a clean slate. You gripped a rose in your hand, and when the time came to throw it to the coffin, you walked very briskly up to it, and dropped it in, like the casket had wounded you somehow, and you desperately wanted to avoid it. Maybe that day did hurt you—after all, my mother was the only mother you had ever had. She had looked after us both as best she could.

After that, it was like you withdrew into some kind of shell. High-school ended, and university came and went. You started off in a medical degree, but changed over to engineering after you realized you hated hospitals. They stank of death, according to you. Engineering would allow you to help sick people without getting too near them—you dedicated yourself to studying cryogenics, in the hopes of learning how to reanimate people after they’d been frozen away. It was sort of like… you were grasping for strands of the immortality I had once wanted so badly.

Meanwhile, I graduated from Auckland uni’ with a BA in English: some help that’d ever be, right? I couldn’t find a use for it, so I went into the service industry. Working late nights at a restaurant in Ponsonby, I always seemed to get back to our apartment in time for you to fall into my arms and cry. For once, I had to be the strong one—you didn’t like how long it was taking for you to get a job doing what you wanted to do. They had you chasing after files and serving coffee, none of the hands-on stuff you signed up for. It didn’t help that they eventually told you that, to really break into cryogenics, you’d have to move overseas. How would you ever get over to somewhere like America, or Britain? You kept dragging me down. I had moved on from my mother’s death, you hadn’t. You wanted to be able to keep people alive for as long as it took for science to learn how to fix them. I never really understood that view, but I played along.

I played along and played along, even though I felt you were doing something wrong. It got to the point where our entire relationship was fake. But then… well, then, you proposed to me. It was completely out of the blue, and, frankly, sort of weird. I mean, how often does a woman to propose to her man? Isn’t it usually the other way around? I guess you’d always been the forceful one. It probably shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did.

We were out at a restaurant for dinner, and then suddenly you were grabbing my hand and shoving a ring in my face. For once, you were smiling. I think I only said ‘yes’ because you hadn’t grinned like that in years. I loved you, sure. But it was strange, thinking I’d be tied down to your obsessive research for the rest of my life.

After a while, I realized that, through me, you’d gained the loophole you’d been wanting—you could finally move overseas. My father had been born in England, which qualified me for citizenship there. All I needed to do was fill out some forms and we could live there, forever. I married you anyway—even knowing you’d exploit me for that precious chance at scientific progress. I’ve never once thought that was a mistake.

At the wedding, there was barely anyone. Just my father, your father, and a guy we had flatted with for a while. All the proceedings felt somber—more like a funeral than any kind of celebration. And when you kissed me—make no mistake, I didn’t reciprocate—your lips were ice cold. We went home that night and slept. It was surreal, and not in a good way. I was shackled to some kind of creature wearing my girlfriend’s skin.

Months on, we moved overseas, and took up residence in a little town a fair way out of London. You commuted to your labs, which were in the center of the city, every day. Three hours there, three hours back: a ten minute car journey to the train station, then a two hour train ride, then fifty minutes alternating between the underground and the buses to get to your strange little laboratory. You still weren’t doing any real, scientific work, but you got to watch it happen. You got to watch them freeze mice, and then try to instantly defrost them.

And, when all the other employees had gone home, you would toy with their calculations and devices, trying to adjust the settings and fix bugs. I never doubted your intelligence, but the night you came home and told me ‘I think I’ve got this thing figured’ actually made me feel excited. But, while you went from strength to strength, my life got progressively duller. I was living in a world made of grey.

I didn’t work anywhere, for one thing. It was sort of depressing, just doing the grocery shopping and then sitting on my ass watching Coronation Street. You left at six every morning, and didn’t come back until ten or eleven at night. There was one time where it got to two A.M, and you weren’t home and you wouldn’t return my calls. I took your three-hour journey, and tried to find you… When I got to the lab, you were asleep on a desk, surrounded by papers.

It got worse when they actually hired you as one of the scientists there. We’d been married for what, six or seven years by then? I thought I was used to you coming and going at weird hours when you were just an assistant. Weird hours meant nothing when you were actually allowed to stay there, dawn to dusk. I was lucky to see you from one day to the next—I think you actually went a week at the lab, once! It got so bad that I eventually had to put my foot down. Do you remember that time?

“Suzie, I’m sick of just waiting around at home all the time!”
“Then do something. I don’t care—get a job, if you want,” You were so nonchalant about my rage… that might’ve been the day you finally broke me. Get a job? I got a job. A job that kept me as far away from you as possible.

Long distances were what I was wanting. I found a job that gave me longer distances than I’d even dreamed of. I had wanted meters or miles worth of distance… I got something far better. I became a flight attendant, working on those commercial sightseeing flights to the moon. It was… fun, quite frankly. It made you come home sometimes. You’d appear in bed on the nights before I left for Heathrow.
“I miss you, Ethan,” You’d say. Well, serves you right—how did you think I felt, watching you treat your work like it was your husband, and not me?! As I drove away each morning, a smug grin would appear on my face. It served you right, watching me do this.

When I got to work, I’d don the uniform, and then walk onto the plane, smiling and showing people to their small, private cabins. It was like some luxury cruise liner—technology had advanced so much since the beginning of the twenty first century. Whenever I did my rounds to make sure the passengers were content, I felt a rush of amazement. Progress- it allowed us to make huge planes that could travel outside the atmosphere and return, without a hitch.

I worked about six flights a month, during the busiest seasons. The higher-ups would always say to me that I worked too hard.
“Well, I have no reason not to work like this,” I’d tell them. “My wife works all the time too, so neither of us are ever home, and my family is in New Zealand.” They’d sigh, and frown, worried for my wellbeing, but ultimately leave me be.

When I came home, you’d tell me that you were fine, and that research was going well. That you’d all managed to defrost a rat the other day with next to no side-effects. You just had to iron out the little things—and as far as you were concerned, they were all ‘little things’, and you’d have perfected the technology.

But then, suddenly, you started talking about some deadline. Some stupid, stupid deadline that meant you couldn’t come and see me even when I was at home. I hated you for that. You were yelling at me all about that ‘deadline’ for months. It drove us both insane. I thought we were going to get divorced, with how little love there was between us. I mean, we hadn’t been close since we were teenagers, but at least it had always been calm between us. Now it was all venom and flames.

On the way back from my last trip, I bought you flowers and chocolate. I drove straight to London, rather than wasting my time in our village. All I wanted to do was get to the lab and surprise you. Your deadline had been in the middle of my trip, after all. I didn’t turn on my phone, because I knew it’d tempt me to call you. I didn’t put on the radio, because I wanted to keep my head clear. I didn’t do anything—I just drove as fast as I could.

I hope you know how long it took to get myself a car-park. There were all these weird vans surrounding the area you worked in, covered in a mix of police logos and news icons. The closer I got to your lab, the thicker the traffic got—and by the time I had reached the building, there was a sea of people swarming outside. No worries, I told myself, clutching the chocolates against me. Your breakthrough probably got media attention—my wife, the superstar! You’ll be a household name soon, sweetie, like Einstein and Rutherford.

Maneuvering towards the doorway, I was met by yellow tape—do not cross, police, etcetera. It was a little off-putting, but I guess when you’ve discovered the secret to cryogenic freezing you need protection, right? The officer on the scene let me through as soon as I told them my name. Said they’d been trying to call me, they were glad I had arrived, that they couldn’t explain what had happened over the phone: something about it being too personal. Well, damn right! My wife’s just made the discovery of a lifetime-- I don’t want to hear about it over the phone.

I’m actually a bit nervous now, climbing up the staircase. What if you think you’re too good for me, since you’ve perfected your cryogenic-thing? Will you leave me for a smarter man-- a richer man? I don’t get paid much as a flight assistant, but sweetheart, if we need more money, I’ll get more for you. I’ll sell my flat-screen TV and we can start saving for another car. I’ll work longer—no, no, you won’t want that. You’re always complaining about me being away too often. If I work even more flights, you’ll get even more angry.

I don’t want you to leave. I complained about your work so much, but really, I’ve been proud! You’re my Spacegirl, reaching for anything you set your eyes on, not caring about the loneliness or the difficulties in your life. You just keep going. Keep going, Spacegirl, there aren’t any limits on what you can do—even the stars aren’t going to stop you. Even I’m not going to stop you… I love you too much to get in your way any more. No more complaints from me. No more yelling or screaming at each other… I’m going to be the best husband I can be, supportive in every way.

Good, I’ve made it up onto the landing. Your lab’ is busy, like usual, full of people and bustling with life. But… why are these people putting their hands on my shoulders, telling me they’re sorry? What do they have to be sorry for?
“Ethan, I’m glad you’re here,” One of your co-workers—I don’t remember his name—gives me a hug. I want him to let go—I don’t know why he’d be hugging me. Maybe it’s congratulatory? Congratulations for picking an amazing wife, I guess. He says something to me, but I don’t hear it. I don’t want to hear it.

I can’t have heard it.

I walk onwards, shoving him aside, but there are tears coming into my eyes. I can’t figure out why I’m crying, since today is so amazing. Today’s the day your dreams come true, so I can’t be sad. I have to be happy… for you. Your co-worker chases after me, guiding me forwards, but I know which way to go. Take a left, then down the corridor into the main area of the building. If you’re anywhere, it’s here. You’re always in that room, tinkering away with complex machines that I could never dream of understanding.

In the center of the room, I see something… evidence of your work turning out just like you wanted it to. A human test subject… she’s been frozen away. Yeah, you’d mentioned something about moving up from rats. I guess that’s what your deadline was all about—you needed to pull this off in time to freeze her. She must be sick, or you wouldn’t have been allowed to try this out—even when you’ve proven that there isn’t any harm in the process, I guess it’d still be frowned on by naysayers in the government. Freezing a healthy, live, human being… not something they’d allow, right?

I get closer to the tank you’re all storing her in. Its glassy walls have fogged up, making it hard for me to see inside. There are more policemen here, and more of the workers. A guy with a bushy moustache strides up to me, looks me over and sighs my name, on the verge of tears.
“We didn’t know she was planning this,” I think he was your boss, but I don’t really remember. A woman walks up to me, her blonde hair draped over her face like a curtain, trying to block out the world. She looks at her feet while she’s talking to me.
“You don’t need to see her if you don’t want to,” She motions me towards the tank, and I’m not sure why. I guess she must’ve been talking about the woman in the tank, not you—though, that said, everyone keeps talking about this ‘she’ like I should care about them. I don’t, I just care about you. Where are you, anyway?

I rub my hand against the glass quickly—it comes away wet and numb. I’ve never felt something so ice-cold. After a moment, I steel myself, and keep wiping off the condensation. The woman’s brown hair and light tan seem familiar. Faster, faster—my hand’s full of pins and needles, almost stinging from touching the frigid tank. I’ve revealed all of the woman’s face now. Her eyes are open… staring at me… like one of those paintings whose eyes move with you: too real for something so still. They’re bright green, cat-like, contrasting against the mix of light browns and pale pinks that make up the rest of her face. Her lips are full, alluring. And she seems so familiar now that the fact I can’t remember her hurts.

My fingers trace the glass, trying to sketch out her face in the dew. She keeps watching me. I hate how she’s watching me: blank green eyes; brilliant green eyes- specks of yellow dance inside them. I press my hand down over the space where her eyes look out from. Her gaze is breaking my concentration… And I need to concentrate as best as I can right now.

… Wait, no I don’t.

Her identity drops on me like a ton of bricks and I don’t know why I ever questioned who it was.

When we were children, I wanted to live forever and you wanted to go into space. You were Spacegirl, my Spacegirl—reaching out beyond the atmosphere for the tranquility you always wanted. You wanted to be alone back then, and that reasoning still stands. You still want to be as alone as you can be. Spacegirl, my Spacegirl, you want to drift out from the Earth and never come back. But it’s not because you hate everyone else… it’s because you’re afraid of letting go. You’ve distanced yourself from me for all these years because you were afraid I would leave you. Afraid I’d die, or forget you, or exile myself from your life in some other way.

When we were children, I wanted to live forever and you wanted to go into space. I was Eternity Boy, the one who wanted everything and nothing. I never liked the idea that I had to die. Who does when they’re a little kid? But then I got older, and I realized that time isn’t much of a thing to have: you use even a little of it and you get sick of the abandonment and the hatred that being alive earns you. But still I chased my goals of ‘life eternal’. Standing here now, one fact rings truer to me than any other: a long life is a half-life. To gain time, you have to give something else up, something precious that you would never want to let go of. What that is differs between everyone, but it always means the world to us once it’s gone.

In the end, we should have swapped childhood dreams: that way we’d be living them right now. I’ve already got big plans for what to do on my next flight: defenestration in your honor, my Spacegirl. You’ve just gotta stay here and keep still, and then maybe if we wish hard enough, we’ll live a moment in each other’s shoes.

I’ll be the one frozen away forever, living a life where no-one ever leaves me or hurts me like you have so many times. And you’ll rot in space, just like you always wanted.