Han kicks a rock off the bridge, shoves his hands deeper into his pockets, and shudders. It is a cold day, the kind that only happens by surprise -- the kind of cold that everyone expects but no one is truly prepared for. It is the kind of cold that prompts a person to wear a coat and jacket, but despite their best efforts still finds themselves chilled.

Pulling a cigarette from his pocket, Han flips the small orange and white cylinder over in his hands, eventually putting it up to his mouth to feel the texture. If you’re doing it right, Olive had once said to him, you won’t taste anything until you inhale.

Han blinks. She’d been standing there with him, a cigarette in her mouth, puffing and blowing little smoke rings at his face. He’d used to love slashing them with his hands, sometimes he’d try and redirect them back at her, blowing air and watching the little circles disappear. Back at the bridge Han sighs, then places the cigarette onto the bridge’s handrail, pointing it straight upright like a candle. Maybe if he ever started smoking, he’d learn how to do tricks like Olive, blow smoke rings and throw tiny rocks through them.

Gently, with hands that shake in the cold, or maybe this time it was from something else, Han pulls out a lighter and lights the end. It took Olive six minutes to smoke one cigarette, six minutes that they’d spend talking and stomping their feet and looking at the stars, depending when at what time they came out. But burning one like this… Han checks his watch and purses his lips. Eight minutes, maybe. Ten max.

Looking up into the sky, where the moon has begun to show itself, pale and fluorescent and ever far away, Han coughs, and then spits into the river that gurgles and babbles beneath the bridge.
It is twilight, and the sky is painted in shades of orange and purple, the death of a day.

In the far distance, a car honks its horn, and Han shifts slightly on the balls of his feet. What would they think of him, he wonders, burning a cigarette on the bridge like this, staring at the sky, alone?
Olive would have told him that no one cared about anything, and that they’d have the same reaction that he would have if he’d seen himself -- a moment of polite curiosity, and then that stranger by the bridge burning but not smoking the cigarette would be forgotten. C’mon, Olive liked to say as they stopped on their walks. You think anyone will remember me smoking here after they round the corner? Everyone’s got too much on their minds for little old me.

You really gotta struggle to remember stuff, she’d say. Like you’ve got to do something either really brilliant or really awful to be remembered, otherwise you’ll be let go. We let things go, as people. We live, we forget.

Han looks down at the cigarette burning slowly next to him.
I let you go, he thinks.

Closing his eyes, he finally lets himself remember. He remembers the cameras flashing, the press, the news crews taking pictures at Olive as she strode before them, Han keeping his head down as he followed behind her. She’d taken him to the bridge the night before, no smoking then, she wasn’t allowed to, not anymore, and finally told him that she was leaving, forever.

He’d stood there, quietly, hands shoved in pockets, just like now, but back then it had been the summer and he’d been sweating. The sky had been dark, and Olive had taken him by the hand and gently pointed to the moon, slowly shifting until she was pointing at a bit of dark, empty space far behind it, and said, “I’m going there.”
He’d blinked, said not a word, he wasn’t good at those, and had wrapped his hands around himself. “How long?” he’d eventually asked, and at that she had sighed and given him a hug, and then she’d said in that soft, raspy voice of hers that by the time she would have woken up, by the time the ship stopped accelerating, by the time she’d defrosted and was learning how to walk again, he and everyone she’d ever known would be long dead.

“So forever,” Han said quietly.

“Effectively, yes.” was the reply.

Then there had been a long silence. “I told you, first rule of life is to never fall in love with an astronaut,” Olive had said after a while. “Stuff like this happens.”

“Mmm.” Han had shuffled around a bit as Olive watched, fingers twitching. Han knew what they were looking for.

“Smoke?” he’d said, starting to reach into his pocket.

“I Can’t.”

“Will you--” Han’s voice was cracking, and he hated that, at that moment, he’d hated everything in the world except for Olive, and he had closed his eyes to breathe a bit while she stood, sad and silent. “Will you remember--”

“Yes.” Olive had said immediately. “Of course. All those days and nights and drinks and that time when you tried to play the piano, or that time you tried to smoke here cause you thought it would impress me and you coughed for a good minute after the first puff, and that one time when--”

Han had wanted to curl up into a ball. Olive was smarter than he was, the fact that she was taking off tomorrow was proof of that. And as she went through the months, the years that they had shared together, he began to realize just how much he had already forgotten. Like an idiot.

As she smiled and recounted a particularly embarrassing incident regarding a cat and Han’s attempt to lure it home it with baloney, Han had raised a hand to stop her. “I thought I had to do something amazing or terrible to be remembered.”

“You were pretty terrible,” Olive said had quietly, laughing. “But you were brilliantly terrible.” She had paused for a moment. “You are.”
Then she’d reached into her jacket, because it was Olive and she always wore those, and pulled out a bouquet of flowers. “I’m not gonna be around for your funeral, so I figured I’d give you…” She shook her head and grinned.

“That’s awfully morbid,” Han had said, but despite that, he’d taken them and given Olive a hug.

“It’s late,” Olive had said after another ten minutes had passed, both of them struggling to come up with words. “I have to go.”
“Yeah,” Han said. “No, I get it.”

The day afterwards, after the walk in front of the gangs of roving reporters and interviews, when it had finally come down to the last hours before the launch, and it was just the two of them sitting in the fitting rooms, Olive already in her orange suit, a helmet and mask over her face pumping pure oxygen into her lungs, getting her ready for sleep, she’d finally cracked. The veneer of stability shattering, her hands shaking, mask fogging up and muffling her voice [as] she started to cry.

“Will you remember me?” she’d kept asking, over and over again, “Or by the time I’m around Saturn will you have already forgotten?”
A technician had arrived then, pushed Han away before he could answer, while another techie dragged Olive back, forced her to sit down. It was the first time Han had ever seen Olive break, cry, and even then, he couldn’t be sure, the mask had fogged up, he couldn’t see her eyes. By the time he’d finally gotten clearance to get back into the room, they’d already moved Olive away, sending her to the shuttle. And so when the ship had finally taken off, Han had been in the nosebleeds, feeling the faint vibrations in the ground as the rocket took off. It had been summer then, and he’d had to squint when the spaceship, massive on the launchpad, now tiny and pathetic against the wide blue sky, crossed in front of the sun.

Back on the bridge, now in winter, Han finally opens his eyes, and stares at the cigarette burning itself out next to him. Pulling out a small recorder, he begins to speak. “This is number… sixty eight. Five years, eight months. You’ll be around Saturn now... I haven’t forgotten.”

There is a small beep as Han releases the record button, and he sighs, breath steaming in the air. “I… Don’t know what to say.”
Watching the cigarette finally reduce itself to ash, Han thinks for a long moment. “I’ll keep recording and sending these, I guess. You’re not forgotten. You’re like…” the recorder clicks off again as Han squeezes his eyes shut and clenches a fist.

A jogger runs by, feet pit-patting on the bridge, pausing for a brief moment, then continuing onwards.

“You’re like a time traveller,” Han says slowly. “Like something that will exist long after I’ve disappeared I guess. And yet, you’re still here, like you’re in the present and in the future, both at the same time. You’re gone but you’re still with us, or with me at least. I still come to the bridge, but.. I don’t know. It’s weird right, I never got to tell you, but through you, I’m… I’m gonna be around long after I’m gone, and you’ll be here from now until my eternity, in some way or another. Although by the time you get these...”

Han finally opens his eyes and nods.

“Yeah. I’ll see you Olive, one day. If you believe in that sort of thing. I’ll speak to you again when you’re at...” He looks around awkwardly and finally smiles. “Well, maybe I’ll skip the next one and go straight to Neptune.”

He clicks the recorder off one last time, and then puts the device down and forces a smile, brushing off the ashes of the cigarette into the water. Turning around, he walks briskly away from the bridge, hands still shoved into pockets.

Far above in the sky, somewhere past the moon, on its way past Saturn’s rings, a tiny spaceship meanders through the stars.
And so the two of them, kept forever apart by the cruelty of time, kept together by a different kind of immortality, go on.