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"So," Leif said, "they said you've been alive for, what? Seven hundred years?"
"Yes, though some days it feels like even longer." Terric had been in plenty of diners before. Ever since diners first became a thing. What he'd never done before, even in a 700-year life, is soar through the cosmos in a diner.
"I can't even imagine a life that long. How do you ever know what to focus on next?"
"I imagine it's not much different from a normal life."
"That's hard to believe."
"Well, in a normal life you focus on what's in front of you. You focus on the next day, the next week. Maybe the next year. It's rare to be thinking about what your life will be ten years in the future, or fifty. Is it much different to extend that timeline out?"
"Uh, yeah, dude." Leif cracked open another beer and handed it to the immortal man sitting with him on the roof of the diner. Their legs hung over the side as the stars stretched into streaks of light overhead. "I think there's a huge difference between knowing you've got, at most, maybe a hundred years, and knowing you've got no expiration date."
"Then how about this, Leif? If we'd swapped places, what would you do?"
"Well, I probably wouldn't have fallen in love with a terrifying space goddess, so..."
"She wasn't terrifying when I met her. She was just... She was simply a scared young woman. And I was a foolish young man."
Leif took a long swig of his beer, his eyes focused on the darkness surrounding the parking lot.
"Yeah," he finally said. "I've been there before."
"You've been there before?" Asked Terric, "you met a woman who fell from the sky, fell in love with her, and then that same woman made you immortal?"
"You know what I mean," Leif took another swig from his beer and let the silence stretch between them before speaking again. "Actually for what it's worth I think you did what any of us would do, try your damn best with what you've got."
"It's not like there was really anything else for me to do. For the first hundred years I didn't know what to do with myself, there's not exactly a rule book for this kind of thing." Terric sighed.
A star shot across the sky, disappearing in the glow of distance street lights, "the song I played when I met her? I thought maybe it would bring her back if only I just...found the right way to sing it." Said Terric.
"Huh." Leif tipped back the last of his bottle. "That's fucking dumb."
Terric shot him a look of disdain. "Well, thank you for that." There was acid in his voice.
"Huh?" Leif was confused. "Oh, don't get me wrong. That wasn't an insult. Most things we do involving love are dumb. It makes sense. It's just dumb, y'know?" Leif opened another bottle and passed it to Terric before opening one for himself.
Terric took the bottle, but looked at Leif for a bit, changing his perception of this strange man. "So...what's the dumbest thing you ever did for love?"
Leif chuckled in a way that was self-deprecating and also tremendously sad. "Man...ok, so I was in this casino..."