I frowned a little and pursed my lips.
“Yeah, we should hang out”.
“Nothing serious, we don’t have to plan anything. It’s hard these days to get together, I know.”
“Yeah, you’re right, let’s do it.”
“Ok, well, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.”
Three days later, I’d set out two expensive camping chairs out on the balcony of my Los Angeles apartment. I handed a not-quite-cold beer to my not-quite-friend, and sat down heavily and sighed,
“Yeah.”
He frowned, and either grimaced or smiled, after taking a swig.
I turned and put on a song.
I chose poorly; it was a 7-minute long LCD Soundsystem deep cut.
And now, an AI image prompt:
A melting beer can rises over the crest of a sun shield in near Venus’s orbit, with a wide-angle view to accentuate the loneliness. Most of the image should be the blackness of space with a smattering of faint, fading stars smeared by gravitational lensing.