When I wasn’t eating or sleeping, I spent my time outside. We had an unspoken agreement to avoid any interaction that would only exacerbate our frustration. I soon realized that unlike Earth, her planet didn’t rotate on its own axis. The sun never set, but remained fixed in the same spot in the sky, distorting everything I thought I knew about the concept of day and night. The only refuge I found was under a boulder located by one of the dunes, which provided me a rare meter of shade. I spent hours on end leaning against the boulder, counting minutes that gradually lost their meaning. Every movement, every action was insufferable. The raging sun allowed for nothing but thoughts, and even they were a struggle to produce, flitting in disjointed fragments. Mostly as fears. Of returning home, to the same spot, going back to the rat race I’d spent a year and a half trying to outrun. I stayed for hours, maybe even days by that boulder, nodding on and off for unknown periods of time. I started feeling as if the shuttle would never come. That I was going to stay there, in the same spot, forever.

One day, waking up abruptly, I found her lying beside me, sprawled out on the sand, this time with white sunglasses. She lay there silently, without a hint of shade or apology. I considered her for a moment, and then looked around me. The purple sky was painted green streaks, turning alternately blue and red, constantly changing colors.

“I think I might be losing my mind,” I said.

She laughed. “I felt the same way at first,” she admitted. She said she didn’t really know what caused the colors to appear in her sky, but thought it probably had to do with the solar flares. “A little like the northern lights,” she explained. “Only it isn’t cold here, and like a million times more beautiful.”

“It’s amazing,” I said, just to keep the momentum going. “I bet people would pay big bucks to see something like this. I mean, it could be one hell of a tourist attraction.”

She considered me for a moment, then turned her gaze back to the sky. She said that on such a hot planet, you couldn’t afford to waste words on chitchat. “Talking just makes you thirsty,” she said. Then she was quiet again for a while, and I, out of sheer awkwardness, tried to be even quieter. We stayed like that, side by side, for some time. At a certain point, she got up, shook off the sand from her clothes, and extended her hand.

“You coming?” she asked, and I stood up as quickly as possible, without daring to ask where we were going.