His Life on Mars

I was in an Indian restaurant. It was called “The Taj Mahal” or something like that. I was listening to two middle aged women talking at the table opposite mine. Why are middle aged women, as a rule, always willing to talk so loudly in public places? Yet they seem so annoyed when they realize people nearby are overhearing them. The two in the restaurant were a prime example. One of them stopped part way through a sentence. For a moment I could hear the cars, church bells, aeroplanes and sirens invading the room from the city outside. Then the woman started a new verbal train of thought, that went like this “I think that man is listening to us.”
“I promise I’m not” I said as earnestly as possible, to avoid trouble. The guy sitting opposite me at my table laughed at this, and I suddenly remembered that I had come here to listen to him.
“You’ve got to believe me” I said to him.
“Earlier I told you that you had three heads. You nodded in agreement” my friend Arthur said. He was the one who was also at my table.
“I thought it was a metaphor.”
“Whatever.”
I would miss his sense of humour when he went to the colony. Of course he couldn’t leave the comic mind here whilst the rest of him went off, far away from me. I would miss the entire person, but the humour was what struck me most at that moment, like one of those planes I could hear unexpectedly falling out of the sky, and straight onto my head. The fact that he was leaving at all bothered me just then, as it had been trying to do for the last couple of weeks, even if I tried to push it away. One strange thought came upon me at that moment. Would he miss these city sounds?
“Well, are you all packed for colonising Mars?” I asked him.
“It’s already colonised. I’m only moving there a bit earlier than most people. I’m doing the easy part.”
Pause. Deep thoughts. Powerful emotions. All in less than a second.
“I’ll miss you” I summed it up. In three words. A massive understatement.
“I’ll miss me too. Also, I’ll miss you” he said, meaning the first sentence both seriously and as a joke. He would miss this part of his life, which was part of him. In a way he was leaving himself behind as much as me. He took the newspaper he’d been reading whilst waiting for me to turn up, and walked away. Forever.