He comes to me in pieces as I watch the stillness of space, envisioning new constellations in the

array of unrecognized stars. I trace the sparks of light with my finger, connecting the dots and
smudging the glass as a result.

How many stars do you think there are in space? I imagine him asking. Can there really be other
ones out there as big as or even bigger than the sun?

I always admired his genuine curiosity, how he viewed things with a particular interest, how he saw
me. He was the one that organized our sleepovers, the one that nudged me to sign up for
afterschool activities such as the chemistry club and the robotics team.

Can you build me a mechanical arm that'll change the channels on the TV's remote, so that way I
don't have to? He once asked sarcastically. How about a drone that we can use to spy inside the
girls' locker room, huh? Wouldn't that be neat?

When we were kids, he would give me piggyback rides and run with me through the sprinklers
across watery arches with captured rainbows. We'd go back home, and my mother would scold us
while our shivering bodies shared a single towel, and in the end, he'd shine me a blue-lipped smile
with his crooked teeth.

That was fun, wasn't it?

Our childhood adventures involved trips to the public pool, wet t-shirts, and popsicles mucking up
our fingers under the August sun. He'd take me to his baseball team's practices, and I'd watch him
bat while I built rovers and complex constructs out of legos on the bleachers.

Booyah! He'd shout after a home run. I'd cheer or clap, and he would always gleam and say the same
thing. It's going, it's going, gone. Kiss that puppy goodbye.

A few years later, our tastes matured, slipping our summers into memories and substituting them
for leather jackets and motorcycle rides on the empty freeway. He and I would stop on the roadsides
by green fields that looked blue under the night sky. We'd sit under the blanket of stars and watch
the moon while dreaming up our futures after high school.