sky
Jane always felt smothered by the daytime desert sky.
A huge blue bowl, cloudless, so cloudless, it always looked closer. Too close. It had no white fluff to help her depth perception pick up how far away it really was.
Rationalizing with science hadn’t helped with this problem at all. Science told her that the blue wasn’t a lid over the top of her. The atmosphere actually was right on top of her head.
Of course, that was a good thing. It meant that she could continue to breath, to live. As long as that sky was there. But it still made her feel a little pressed in. A little claustrophobic.
The nighttime desert sky, though? Well, that was the exact opposite.
There was no sky, no sky ever, that made her feel as free as the night in the deserted desert. The sky filled so impossibly with stars that she could see forever. She could see into the past. If she kept looking long enough, if she looked the right way, Jane felt she might see through the blackness into the Big Bang itself.
Then Thor came.
It felt like a cliche to say everything changed. It hadn’t really. Not changed so much as intensified. She wasn’t crazy anymore. She was right. Thor proved it. Proved that she wasn’t staring into her telescope looking for rainbows and daydreams, like everyone had thought. Or, more accurately, she was staring into her telescope looking for rainbows, but they were there. There to be found.
She loved Thor for that. Would always love him for that, even if there was no other reason to love him. Though there were a million other reasons to love Thor.
Thor was kind. Thor was attentive. Thor made sure that everybody around him, no matter how short a time he’d known them or how little he actually liked them, was happy. Thor recognized his mistakes and tried to fix them. Thor didn’t expect to be catered to when he was a prince, only pulling on that cape of authority when he needed it.
Jane was pretty sure she could try attaching a reason to love Thor to every star in the desert sky and run out of stars first.
He looked at her like she was precious, even if she was wearing a wrinkled, ugly plaid shirt and accidentally putting dirty dishes in the cupboard instead of the sink. She didn’t know why he did that. What it was about her that made him look at her that way. Jane wasn’t very special after all, except for her brain. And even with three degrees, she knew it was only because of Thor that people gave her any credit at all. Take Thor away and she was just a crazy lady in the desert who looked up at the sky instead of watching where she was going.
She didn’t know why Thor seemed to love her as much as she loved him. It scared her, a lot, especially when he went away for long stretches, that he wouldn’t love her when he came back. But it never happened. Thor always looked at her like he needed her. Like he was finally safe when she was nearby, finally at home. He looked at her like…
Like he was an astrophysicist, and she was the nighttime sky.