Catherine was slim with straight, long brown hair and rich hazel eyes fringed with shining gold. She was a genuine and frequent laugher with a pretty, attentive face, angular lips that were always smiling and teeth that smiled with them. Her body was petite, firm and casually strong, so that she looked ready to hike up a mountain or climb into a tree at a moment's notice.

I had met her without ceremony, talked a little with her and her several friends, then moved off with them to a little drinking hole. The bar we had gone to was unassuming; its patrons diverse but unnoticeable. They could have been extras in a film, paid eighty-five dollars a day to not look at the camera.

Generic, bass heavy music reverberated sloppily throughout the establishment. It worked on people hand in hand with the alcohol, brought them unnecessarily close into shouting conversations which relied wildly on contextual clues, on a surrender to nodding and smiling. Catherine found her way to the jukebox quickly and quietly, and in minutes Michael Jackson and then James Brown came effortlessly out of the speakers. A few people smirked, or looked around with exaggerated animations for the culprit. Catherine danced.

She danced alone, goofily, with long limbed, jerky, loose movements meant for herself and nobody else. Her face was upturned towards the ceiling, alternately laughing and pantomiming lyrics. Between songs she told me excitedly about a recent, sunny day, a day spent alone when she danced and it was fun. A simple story.

I enjoyed her effortless energy, watched her happily as she spoke, danced, and played bar games in the stuffy, smoke filled dive. I was taken with her long, loose limbs and her casual, unaffected pleasure in things. And then suddenly I wanted to make sure I would see her again.

"Do you want to go to the top of the world with me?" I asked too soon, across the cigarette smoke, the rich, beery, dive bar smell, and the music which had returned to drolling, meaningless bass, "Just the two of us?"

"You mean the tower? The top of the tower? I've been there," she said simply, answering a question I didn't ask.

"No the top of the world. Where the sun and the moon are. You can lay on the clouds and it's always sunny in the day and always clear at night. It's up above all the weather, you know. It's above everything. I love it. I bet you'll love it."

"Sure, when?"

She would go with me to the top of the world like she would go with some other guy to the pool table at the end of the room. That was okay, though, she'd said she would go, and for that my insides felt warm and dizzy.

"I don't know, tomorrow? Tomorrow night?"

"Sure. What's your number? I'll call your phone so you have mine."

I recited my cell number obediently. When my phone began buzzing I went about saving hers, punching her name out carefully on the keypad.

"There," she said smilingly, putting her phone back into her pocket. "Do you play darts?" I did alright with the darts, but she didn't seem to care if I was any good.

The next day the sunlight came down white and shimmering, light and comfortable because of the dry air, and I felt good. I flew up through the clouds fast, enjoying as always the uplifting, empowering simplicity of flight and the crackling, clean smell of thin, fresh air. The top of the world was about the size of a basketball court, with a raised, square pedestal in its middle some ten feet to a side and a foot and a half high. In the center of the pedestal was a single, slim depression like the ones on laundry machine quarter trays. In it sat Sun, coin shaped, a few inches thick and about three feet high, beaming bright as could be. Sun was white with a roiling, orange texture that flowed along his surface. He was friendly and warm and made you feel optimistic and I truly liked him.

"Hey, Sun, I met a girl."

"Is she pretty?"

"Gorgeous. And funny and incredibly cute. She's great."

"Good. Where'd you meet her?"

"Through people. It hardly matters. I got her number and I think we're going to see each other tonight. I'm crazy excited."

I was standing in front of Sun and could feel my skin drink in his pure, white favor. It was warm and inviting there, and just standing in the clean, hot light produced a sort of energizing feeling that I liked very much.

"Where are you going to take her?" Sun asked, interested, friendly, and gleaming with pleasant heat.

"I thought here, maybe. It's a place people don't know about, you know, and one of my favorites."

"Hmmm. Well you know I think it's a great idea, but you may want to run it by Moon."

"Yeah I was going to wait up for him, and just lay around in front of you until then."

I sat down in front of Sun on the upraised pedestal, sleepy and warm, and began to lay down so that his heat was all around me.

"Sounds good," said Sun, "only move a little to the side if you don't mind. You're putting the whole world in the shade."

Moon took the place of Sun with a stony, grinding sound that rumbled low and reverberated in my stomach so that I was awake suddenly but sleepily. There were no visual cues; after the several second, gravelly grumbling noise, Sun's orange, shimmering, fluid texture simply vanished. It was replaced, in the same instant, by the ominous luminosity of Moon's bone white, smooth surface. Moon was the same size and shape as Sun.

"What's this about reveling in distractions?" Moon's voice was cool and monotone, tempered with ageless experience that couldn't help betraying a sense of necessary condescension.

I felt fogged and unclear, hardly awake and a little disoriented.

"Hi Moon," I faltered, collecting my thoughts groggily.

The top of the world was cold now. I found myself shuddering involuntarily and sorely missing the invigorating warmth of Sun. I felt already that perhaps this wasn't the place for me, much less newly met friends.

"I met a girl, Moon. I thought that she was really great, I guess. I just wanted to show her something new, you know, something that would set me apart a little."

The black night had settled thickly by now. I felt a bewitching gloom cast against my skin by the forlorn twinkle of millions of stars, a crisp, keen sense of insignificance, and a sad realization of the celestial distances spanning effortlessly in all directions.

"You're succumbing to an appetite for placation," said Moon unhurriedly, "the desire for comfort, Jared, is a swelling, insatiable monster."

"It's okay to want to be liked, Moon. And it's okay to want companionship. It feels good, loving people. I only wanted to bring her here because it's beautiful."

Moon was quiet for a few moments. The pedestal which hosted both Sun and Moon at their appropriate times was thoroughly cool now. I felt its cold lifelessness permeating my body, felt the warmth of the previous day and the excitement of the previous night crystallizing into a sort of impotent, detached memory.

"This is a place for rising above," continued Moon, metering his words slowly so that I heard each one with melancholy clarity.

I waited to speak patiently, feeling the vague desire to contradict Moon drain away from me like water from melting ice. When I opened my mouth, he began again abruptly.

"We don't let you come to the top of the world lightly, Jared. If you want to be down there in it, the way the rest of them are, that's your decision. But we certainly won't have you parading the evidences of your flippant emotional needs up here among the celestial bodies."

The tightness in my throat hardened quietly and uncomplaining into a deep, irreversible resignation. I said nothing. Then, feeling suddenly the obligation to phone Catherine and call off getting together, I felt a renewed anxiety and a heavy, bitter dread.

Moon was quiet as if we hadn't spoken; he glowed solemnly with his ghostly, bone-white light, punctuating his judgment with a hard, intentional silence.

I took out my phone quietly with every intention of calling Catherine, but with a sudden and unexpected cowardice opted instead to text. My thumb punched out the words quickly. I read it over once and pressed Send.

Hi Catherine. Something came up and I can't take you to the top of the world. Sorry.

I sensed the eyeless, reproving gaze of Moon all around me as the warm glitter of the previous night skulked stealthily into embarrassment and remorse. Gazing silently at the edge of the top of the world, I felt the damaged haughtiness, the unsure rejection of all things that kept me coming back to Sun and to Moon. Beyond its edge, the top of the world fell away into a humming, soft blackness below; a humid depth hazy with city lights that emitted a low, tumultuous buzz ringing with the meaningless follies of routine life.

My phone buzzed and I flipped it open instinctively. It was a text from Catherine.

That's cool. Darts instead?

And then a sudden warmth and a buoyant, smiling recklessness. The sensation radiated upwards from my ribs with a bright tingling, and broke away into a subtly expanding grin.

I punched Sure into my phone, pressed Send with my thumb and then stood up quickly and stretched. I felt the coolness of Moon's pedestal distanced from my skin, and the suffusion of a sort of rash, beaming confidence into my warming body.

With a few paces and a quick, spare, pencil dive I was careening away from the top of the world and back towards the humid, sticky embrace of society; towards all of its promises of pain and pleasure, gain and loss, love and loneliness.