It is not the end of the world.
You were not meant to be on that spaceship.
You were not meant to be there for the departure in the first place.
It would be too hard to watch him go, you had said.
He wouldn’t be able to go through with it if you were there, he had said.
You bid your farewells early, (yesterday) like you’d both agreed.
You already made your promises to keep an eye out for his mother, his sister, his nephew, the old high school volleyball team.
It should not matter that you didn’t see the physical vessel leave the planet.
You didn’t want to watch him go upward and onward to join the aliens just like he’d said he wanted (when you were five and bleary eyed, in the dim light of the television, a documentary about mars, when you both should have been sleeping).
You ran the whole way there, anyway.
You are late—you are always too late—but you can still see the trail of smoke, twisting up up up fading into the blue blue blue of the atmosphere as man made increments of time put distance between you.
The earth stays rightfully on it’s axis, spinning though you cannot feel it.
You tell yourself it is better this way.
You know it’s a lie.
You think you should have followed him, fear of the unknown be ******.
It is not the end of the world, oh, but (by all the stars in the universe) he was yours.