She felt the darkness move in closer, take on weight, begin to immobilise her with its destiny. She tried to focus on the available light, picking out one of the brightest stars in the swath of the Milky Way. But almost immediately it seemed to disappear, as if looking at it somehow used up its light, reaching out of its own past for her eyes, so far in its future. The star popped back into existence when she moved her focus just to the right - an immeasurable stretch of time and space covered in infinitesimal fractions of both - and it entered her close peripheral vision where she could see it again. One star after another, fading and reappearing, endless light-years, time for a star's birth and death, expressed in a flaw in her sight. Or perhaps the fault was in her perception: the star didn't fade, but her mind refused to acknowledge what it knew no longer existed. She moved her gaze back and forth a few more times, losing and then finding one star in particular. Perhaps that's what she needed to do with herself: look obliquely in order to bring whatever was left of herself into view, or to see what there had been before it seemed to have disappeared, to convince herself it hadn't.