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“One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
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The woman leaned back against the stone, and took a swallow of her whit-bier. Her hair blew back from her shoulders and trailed, like strands of aqua silk, across the stone. Her hair framed the name etched there, and she scowled in a drunken way at the spectacle of it all.
She leaned forward and shook her hair back to its accustomed spot on her shoulders. Sighing, she knocked back some more of her beer. She grimaced — it had begun to warm in her hand. Pale ale tasted like crap when it got warm, even with the citrus notes.
Looking up at the motes of dust floating in the lengthening sunbeams, she marveled at what a lovely sunset she had been gifted with, and then made a moue when she realized she was enjoying it alone. She blew a somewhat messy raspberry at the deepening twilight and the damned dust and the noseeums, and leaned forward again to chuck her empty beer bottle at the nearest grave marker. The beer bottle detonated like a bomb.
Damn it all. She reached to her right and slid another bottle out of the six-pack. She glanced at it; she wasn't going to linger here much longer, it was the last bottle in the pack. Blue kissed blue, when she raised her eyes to the darkening cornflower hue of the sky. She felt tears prickle. Cursing again, she adjusted the shoulders on her jumpsuit and leaned back again.
At one point in her life, she loved this time of day, during this time of year. She loved the warm wind that caressed her cheek as the sun rose; she loved it when the dapples of sunlight played along the length of her body as she lay under her favorite tree; she loved the cool of night as she slid, skyclad, between the sheets of their deep bed with the surly, misunderstood love of her life.
During that time, summer seemed to last forever. Now? Every day from May 12th to after St. Martin's Summer ended was just another day to mourn everything she had lost.
She raised the beer over her head, and popped the bottle cap off her drink on her lover's gravestone. She took a swig — ahh. So much better when it was cold.
As the Sun set, she raised her hand, and 'cupped' the star with infinite gentleness. She smiled, and thought of a time when her man, lying beside her in their bed before the act of love, had shared with her his recollection of the first time he had laid eyes on their solar system's Sun.
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He was on his way to Chikkyu to find Son-Kun, and had passed Sol to arrive at his future rival's planet. He had gazed through the view-port of his pod at the sun and was struck by how beautiful the star was up close.
It was a white dwarf, the star, and had been going through solar maximum. The Ouji had watched as a gigantic solar prominence erupted from the star's surface, the heavy-duty view-port shielding him from the extreme radiation and proximity of the star. He had recollected, then, that his enormous bodyguard had been chattering at him the whole time in a nonsensical prattle, and the Prince had simply muted the big buffoon.
For five glorious minutes, he watched Sol and marveled at its beauty. His view-port split the white star's spectrum, and he was astounded by the myriad colors streaking out of the prominence. The Ouji sat there, careening through space, blown away by the spectacle laid out before him. He wondered if he would ever see anything as breathtaking.
He had stroked her cheek, then, and graced her with a rare, genuine smile. It was a beacon in the gloom of the night. "I got my answer to that. Shine your light on me tonight, Bulma."
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Remembering, hurting, the woman sucked at her teeth, her back to her man's grave-marker. She upended her bottle of whit-bier, and drained it. She watched twilight deepen further, and smashed the last bottle against a neighboring gravestone, and wondered if she'd ever truly be happy again.