Getting close to Fornacis

‘I wish there weren’t so many words’, she said.
‘But there are never enough words’, I replied.
‘I wish there weren’t so many stars’, she said.
‘Do you mean those only visible with the naked eye? Or all of them - even the ones we can never see?’
With so little unsaid, we parted that night and, like she’d suggested, I joined the army.

Thus goes the closing paragraph of the novella inspired by this song. Its military drums left few other options. He was a poet and she worked in the typing pool, so she’d had her fill of words. Action, or even silence, was what she craved.
But this tune is really what happens when David Byrne gets into his rocking chair and muses while leaving the telly on. Everything seems sad even though the lyrics frequently aren’t. Even the hopefulness sounds hopeless.
Vast plains of emptiness are before us, and a giant sky full of orange. A conversation they’d had before many times was about to resume, beginning at the point where it had been abandoned. But it would not stimulate, because after forty years of marriage, the stars were invisible and the eyes no longer naked, but clothed coldly behind glasses. He had survived the war, and returned to claim her.
‘Come back to the car, Vern. There’s nothing up there’.