It had been fifteen years since the sun had last risen.

You took it with you.

And ever since then, the world has existed in darkness. No color. No warmth. Only the icy air of a dying planet. Sometimes I ask myself if you knew what you were doing—if you knew the consequences all your calculating and all your theorizing might bring… Maybe something happened to you in that lab, I don’t know.

I’ll never know.

Isolation enjoys creating monsters of human beings.

In my dreams you still come to me, screaming. The terror palpable in your bulging red eyes and shaking hands, reaching for me as if to warn of some unimaginable evil. Evil only you had seen. Perhaps it was the same evil then as the evil I see now, this darkness. You turned our world into a graveyard.

Millions have died. Even under ground, millions more are set to freeze. To starve. And I will be among them.

So great was your love.

After the incident, a few fortunate souls left the rest of us behind for other solar systems, in hopes of a new Earth.

Matthew secured a spot for me on the Goldilocks-9 despite my…affiliation to you and your horrible crime. I could’ve gone with them, I could’ve left this rotting place, but I chose penance. On your behalf. On my own even, for the second-hand shame of having ever said ‘I do’ to a man like you.

Now, I wear the damned rings to remind myself of the Wesley Gable who would’ve never let something like this happen. You were our carbon emissions hero, once upon a time. The man on every newspaper, every news station, boasted about on NPR and several Tonight Shows… You were good with them, with people. At some point they grew to love you more for your character than your science.

Now, I sit here beneath the glass in this bunker by the sea, scanning the stars for the fire of your return. And when it gets lonely, I twist these bands around my finger and listen to the cracking of ice, shifting below the ocean surface, imagining you’ll bring the sun and your cheeky grin to the world once again.