She had eyes like burnt out stars. He didn’t know why he took off his hat, but it felt like the appropriate thing to do. His feet sunk into the snow. He didn’t notice. It was worse somehow that she was beautiful. Pretty girls aren’t supposed to die like this. He knelt down and touched her hands. He could feel that the blood in her veins had stopped flowing. Every little thing that had made her human had stopped in a moment, like an ancient civilization wiped away in the blink of an eye by a vengeful act from the heart of the cosmos. He set her hands down and looked into her eyes. He couldn’t even see his own reflection. He felt guilty, he could see that there was once depth and beauty in those eyes, but now, now he couldn’t see anything. Now that depth and beauty didn’t matter. Now she didn’t matter. 

Some people would say that whatever it was that she had beyond flesh and blood and bone, what had given her the light in her eyes would still live beyond her; Some great cosmic force would keep that light safe forever. He didn’t believe that. If there was a God, He had not shown his light on her. After all, why would a beautiful young girl be dead and bloody in the mountain snow? He wanted to see a spectacular explosion of light rising up from her into the heavens. But that wasn’t there, and he couldn’t pretend that it was. He saw nothing. 

He thought about lying down in the snow with her. He thought that would be poetic. He kept staring at her, thinking that if he looked long enough he’d see what he wanted. He could envision a lifetime’s worth of experiences just by looking at her eyes and yet still what he saw in the moment was completely empty. He wondered if it really mattered whether he got back on his horse and rode home or if he died in the snow. He was riding to the same place either way. He thought that was poetic too. But he didn’t lie down in the snow with her because poetry would not fix the overwhelming sadness he felt. Like he was being drowned in mud.

The true tragedy was not that she was beautiful or young but that if she had lived to be old it would have ended all the same. The true tragedy was that her death, as horrific as it was, was not a tragedy at all, just an inevitability reached sooner. Yet despite the emptiness, he still saw what once was in her eyes. A billion years of birth and death living in her eyes; great floods tearing through the earth, drowning the creatures that roamed it; civilizations plated in gold melting away; and galaxies exploding, ending a million worlds and maybe something new. In a cold hateful universe desperate for the future to change he thought he could protest and just let a tragedy be. 

He looked into her eyes. They were blue. He closed her eyelids and stood there for a while as the snow fell down.