A light in the attic.

"I don't think I believe in God anymore." It was a blunt statement, sure, but coming from her, coming from those songbird silver lips that dripped like rain from the skin of an apple, well, from her it sounded like a confession.

"And why's that?" I said, turning to face her.

"Well ... it's just a feeling I have. Or I guess you could say its a feeling I don't really have anymore." She smiled slightly but there was something else behind it as well, something I couldn't quite place although I know I had seen it once before--it was the same distracted smile of my mother watching her first and only child leave for the first time and knowing deep down that although he may come back from time to time, she wouldn't ever really be his home again.

"Feeling a bit old then? Losing your lustre perhaps? Feeling the ache of age in your bones?" I said.

"Maybe," she said and the smile became a bit more obvious. "It's just ... when I was a child I would never have doubted God's existence for a second. I could just feel it, I could feel it in everything and see it everywhere. Everything throbbed in tune to it: an insects wings, the hum of the city streets, the flicker of electric light or the beating of a heart. The world was just like a big symphony that some spirit was playing in a key too high to hear, at a rhythm too complex to untangle.

"But still, I could sense it was there, you know? I could feel the wonder, I could feel its tones and sense the beauty of it in my bones, the beauty of every living thing being unknowingly connected with silver wire and copper thread in song. God was in every footstep and every silt breeze. I was sure of it. It was so beautiful, like a soundtrack to the night sky but ... well, I haven't felt that way in a long time," she said.

"So you are feeling old then. You may not admit it, but I know you've got a few gray hairs sprouting on that lovely little head of yours, dearest."

"I do not!" she said, eyes growing wide.

"Oh yes you do. You pluck them out in the morning."

Her lips compressed in a dark line, in symmetry, as she tried to suppress another smile and keep up her mock-outrage. "And just how would you know? You've never had the privilege of waking up next to me, seeing me without my mask."

"No, but I've had the privilege of using your bathroom once or twice and I have to tell you... if you don't want anyone to know, you should probably do a better job of washing those white hairs down the sink drain. Maybe hide the tweezers better too. Actually, I think I even see one ... right ... there," I said pointing at her head. There was nothing there but oceans of lovely twilight hair, dark like the night sky, dark like lowest chord on a piano. She swatted my hand away and tried to look a bit more annoyed then she actually was.

"Thank you. I'll be sure to keep that in mind, Robert, now that I know you're an expert on disguising your age. Is that how you pick up all the young women? You just pluck your hairs, hide them well, and pretend to be fifteen again?"

"Well, there's a little more to it than just that, but yeah, you've sort of got my basic strategy down." I chuckled, and looked down at her waist for a moment.

She had such beautiful hair.

I sighed and we fell silent, both looking out at the field around us. It was sweet and warm and the green was good, but there was an emptiness to it too. It had the same lazy melancholy of every other late spring evening, the kind of inbetween time that feels young and old at the same time: as though your entire childhood once took place on an evening like this in the hour or so it took the sun to bleach; as though no other season existed from the ages of six to sixteen and all the moments in between.

She leaned back against the wooden bench and it creaked slightly in acceptance. I turned back to her, watching her feet kick absentminded and small in the dust. "Can you remember the last time you felt like that?"

"You mean, when was the last time I felt like there was grace in the world?" She was quiet for a moment.

"Well ... I guess it was when I saw the city from above for the first time. It was a flight from California and the sun had set just before we passed over and I could see all the electric lights turning on the first time. They were all in tune. They just, I don't know, they glowed with each other, like a grid of fireflies or something. The window was tiny and the wing, I was sitting right behind the wing, the wing blocked out half the view but it looked just like endless fields of glowing orbs or ... like the heavens had suddenly snapped into alignment. I had gone my whole life without seeing that view before..."

Her eyes shivered a bit like a dancer and she tried to hide it, as if the memory of it was still enough to make her cry.

"That was the last time I felt that way too." I said.

She offered something that sounded halfway between a laugh and a sob, wiped away the warmth from the corner of her eye, and smiled at me. She was a sleepy storm.

"But you realize that wasn't a heaven, right? It was all built by men like you and me," I said.

"Like me?"

"Well ok, maybe not like you. You'd make a pretty poor man, as far as men go."

"Oh and you're just a paradigm of masculinity then I take it? A real man's man, a man's man and oh such a lady's man too. Do tell me, how do you do it?"

"Why such sarcasm?" I asked incredulously. "I'll have you know I'm pretty tough. I ride a motorcycle, kill deer with my bare hands, bathe in baked beans, and we both know I've left a string of sexual conquests across three continents."

"Right," she said and turned back to the field. Both of us just sitting and staring at lovers leaving the way the sunlight bent. Gravity loosened its belt and the green just seemed to hang there, suspended like the moon. I felt for a moment like we could hide here together from our closest friends.

She took a breath and continued. "There was a time I believed, a time I really believed. It all just seems so ugly and discordant now. It seems so wrong."

"I still say its the grey hairs maybe. Admit it."

She looked at me like I was cheapening the conversation, but she wasn't serious. At least, I don't think.

"Honestly, I think you may be be confusing spirituality with that general sense of joy that comes from being young in an old world," I said.

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. Its a feeling that I think sort of drains away the more you learn about loss, the more you learn about your own failings. Its why we came to sit in a park like this for no reason other than to watch the kids. It makes us feel almost young. Hell, we're not even that old. Imagine how your poor grandmother feels."

"Maybe you're right," she said. But the kids were hiding in the trees around us, their chirps fading into rickety lyricless cricket songs and cicada hums; the heat sinking but still thick like a blanket on the knees; the smell of smoke in the wind; and an unfilled promise of other nights just like this one stretching on and on, one by one, in an endless line before and after us, all as the sun drained out of a sky unready to see it go just quite yet.

"What if there is no afterlife, Robert?" she said suddenly. She sounded upset. "The more I think about it the more it seems like something we just invented to excuse ourselves from taking responsibility, to excuse us from exploring all the possibilities and really knowing all of life before we finally die. An excuse to sit on our ass and watch television. Aren't we just wasting our time here in 9-to-5s with no point? Treating our hearts like treasures to be guarded."

There was a womb overhead and it sheltered us for a moment.

"Lets fly to Argentina, Robert, lets fly down there and walk our way back. I don't even know how to speak Spanish. Or lets go to Patagonia, let's go see the end of the world. If God still lives anywhere it'll be down there, in giant castles of rock and glacial ice stacked up to the ceiling."

"I do believe you might be having an existential crisis."

"Yeah, since I was 15," she sighed. "Maybe I should just be glad I've lost that feeling, but I can't help feeling empty about it. I've gotten to be very good about turning off emotions," she said.

"Treating your heart like a treasure then?"

"Maybe. Maybe I'm a hypocrite."

There were crucifixes hiding on the edge of sight, like stacks of books teetered unsteadily near the ceiling. I realized she was right. Maybe we should have been doing slightly more important things with what time we had left, but sitting next to her here watching the sun sink, well it did feel kind of important.

I wondered idly what she was like undressed, how her hips felt caged in a man's arms, if her passion was perfect like a thin burning candle. She sat there quite nice, like a light in the attic. I was just a key.

I tried to keep my leg from shaking as I edged closer. She turned back to me and looked in my eyes. My heart stopped beating and my chest felt too small for it and I realized suddenly that I had less time left than most. That was what did it for me. That was what broke the wax.

"So lets go to Patagonia," I said.

I leaned in, touched the back of her head, and kissed her there in the park while the sky caught fire above us.