We had been traveling for so long that I could no longer tell where I was when I woke up. Just him and me, together. Originally, the doctors gave him three months, and we decided to spend his remaining time exploring the world, but then the three months passed, and a year, and now I didn’t even know how many years it had been. Maybe decades. We wandered the earth, staying until a place felt too familiar, and then moving on. And each morning, when I looked out the window of the inn or cabin or hostel and saw endless grassy plains, I couldn’t be sure whether I was on the Canadian prairie or the Russian steppes.

Lately, though, our movements had slowed, and I got the sense that time was finally catching up with us. With him. We took a boat to Reykjavik and stayed for two whole weeks, and even when he was ready to leave, he didn’t want to go far. We found ourselves an hour’s drive inland in a tiny guest house under an astonishment of stars, and the first night we were there, I woke to an empty bed and walked outside to find him staring at the sky. “Are we on the moon?” he asked as I came up beside him.

I honestly couldn’t tell anymore. “Maybe,” I said.

“I thought I’d feel lighter here. What do you call it, weightless.”

But there we stood, our feet firmly on the ground, both of us breathing in the cold night air, still breathing. What would become of us? Of me, when he was gone? “Look at the rocks,” I said. It did look like the moon here. “Have you ever seen rocks like that in your whole life?”

I could almost hear him shaking his head in the stillness.

There was just enough starlight to make out those rock formations, the boulders that took on new forms in the dimness, coming alive. For a moment, they were sheep, and I remembered the flock that blocked the country road in Ireland, and how we had nothing to do but wait, nothing to do but turn up the rental car radio and dance a jig by the side of the road amidst a sea of wool, our creaky bodies slow and laughing. I remembered the sheep, and for a moment I remembered, faintly, that life we had before we began traveling. All the ordinary wonders of coffee and newspapers, of falling leaves, of long mornings under warm blankets.

The light changed, and we were back on earth. We looked up together to see the sky parting under the rippling green curtains of the northern lights. Of all the things we’d seen in all the places we’d been, we had never seen this. I pulled him close to me and held on tight, standing still at last as the world kept spinning.