Michelle faced a painting arrayed in violent strokes of purple and red. Her eyes unfocused with jaded disinterest. If there was meaning hidden in the oil paint splatters, it was the most trivial thing in the world at this moment.

She had been perusing the gallery for the past twenty-three minutes, stopping at each piece for just the right amount of time to look contemplative and learned without appearing lost. Her hair was finally perfect, each strand in its place. Her smart glasses, her cosmopolitan jacket, and her canvas book bag were placed, one accessory after another, with the intention of looking just right. Nevertheless, she felt misshapen.

Michelle would never confess to spending sixty-eight minutes creating her ensemble, nor would she admit to putting a new copy of "Lolita" back on the shelf of the bookstore eighty-nine minutes ago after finding a slightly more color coordinated copy in the bargain books bin. She kept these secrets because she believed there were more important things. Elsewhere in time and space, bigger things began and ended with no concern as to how long Michelle admired a sculpture or whether or not she lost those ten pounds.

Two and a half million light years away, a star known only to a handful of astronomers by an irrelevant alphanumeric catalog designation began to die. Though it had arguably been dying since conception, it only recently began fearing death.

The complex chemical reaction of life is, from a certain perspective, a constant and inevitable expenditure of one's few remaining breaths, however conservatively one chooses to spend them. There is no single moment at which the process of deterioration begins; everyone marks their own arbitrary point of time to stop living and start dying. The arbitrary distance between beginning and end of death is, nevertheless, regarded as the most precious measurement of life.

The star will burn for another twelve thousand years before it becomes too heavy for itself, but Michelle will die just as slowly over the next fifty-three years, leaving behind a life that was equally short.

While the star was burning away the last of its mortality in a losing fight with entropy, Michelle realized she no longer knew why living was inherently good. And while Michelle's body gradually accumulated genetic imperfections and cells that would no longer divide, the star's thoughts turned to tiny things, like hydrogen molecules and planets.

The star fixed its ancient gaze on a dim blue planet in a spiral galaxy and decided time and space were too arbitrary to be important in death. There, crawling with two legs of meat on a crusty ball of molten rock, looking at a painting and dreaming of unattainable perfection, the star found unique companionship.

"Little creature," it called across space, "will you love me in my final hour, even though I am a star bigger than the sun around which your planet revolves, and have no sense of fashion?"

Michelle gave the only answer she knew: "My dear star, will you love me though I am small and have never finished Lolita?"

"I will love you until I go dark," the star answered.

And it suddenly occurred to them that non-existence might be just as artificial and arbitrarily measured as existence had been.

Twelve thousand years later, the star died of gravitational exhaustion. Only a handful of astronomers made note of this, for Michelle had died 11,947 years earlier. The star's light stopped reaching Earth about 2.5 million years after Michelle's death. Somewhere in heaven an arguable number of angels with perfect wings debated about how many pins could fit into the head of a human being. Michelle spent exactly fifteen seconds more imagining such a scene while gazing at the painting in front of her before finally moving on to spend another seventy-six seconds staring at a van Gogh reproduction.

But who's counting?