There are few things in life that remain consistent. Everything around us is constantly changing, almost entirely unpredictably. You lose a job, you find another. People leave, other people enter. You move from one home to another. Your body and mind is continuously growing and changing. Everything is inconsistent. Or, almost everything.

One thing you can count on to never change is the sky. It is true that the sky is always changing, whether it is a bright blue or a dusty grey. Whether there are white fluffy clouds or none at all to be seen. Whether there are thousands of stars or only one. But, it is this everlasting unpredictability that makes the sky completely predictable, if that makes sense. You can always count on the sky to be different every single day.

Being both a stargazer and a cloud watcher, Ivanna always found peace in the endless altering and perpetual beauty of the sky. She would lay on the cool summer grass every day and night, watching the sky shift from grey to blue to orange to indigo. While the world rapidly changed around her, Ivanna basked in the permanence of her beloved sky. The unchanging change of it was relentlessly gratifying. Even though her life was brisk and unforeseeable, she could always count on the fact that the moon would always be the moon and the sun would always be the sun.

Or, at least, this is what she believed until May 11th. She lay in the grass in her daily routine and watched the sky. The hustle and bustle of her city hummed in her ears and the warm breeze tenderly brushed her auburn locks from her freckled face. She counted the clouds and tried to imagine what they felt like. She was so distracted by the thought of them, it took her a moment to see the bright grey object speedily coming towards the earth. It came fast, so fast. Breathless Ivanna did not know how to interpret this. She heard someone yell in the background, but she did not notice what they said. Within seconds, the object had plummeted onto the earth, not far from Ivanna’s location.

The boom was so loud, she could not hear a thing. She watched her baby blue sky turn entirely orange for a few moments, and then completely white. There was nothing to be seen. There was nothing.

There were no more stars. No more clouds. No more sun. No more moon. No more blues or oranges or greys. The calming permanence of the sky was no longer existing for Ivanna.