text: In the news, they told us it would happen in three years. An explosion in the night sky. Trillions and trillions and trillions of miles away. Something that had, in all actuality, started almost two thousand years before. A collision. Two stars. Originally, so far apart from each other, one spiraling in toward the other for billions of years until both became locked in a gravitational death dance--ever so slowly, each pulling the other back, closer and closer. The expectation everyone had was to be able to look into the night sky, across trillions of miles of space, and see an increased luminous glow. Two becoming one. A birth. The galaxy becoming new parents of a bouncing, baby red nova once again. A baby new. A new baby sun. So there it was, this news, and the expectations, and the excitement about the idea of seeing these things that we know so little about. Like looking through a neighbor’s window, watching a brief moment of vulnerability, or capturing some mundane-to-them-thing that you’ve just in fact learned in that very instant. The birth of a memory. This new, temporarily brightest star would still not be as bright as the sunlight reflected off of one of our neighbor planets in the just-right moment of orbit in our night sky. It would be more catching a glimpse of a Natalie Portman through a crowd at an airport, and less bumping into your local weatherman in line, buying groceries. (Which, like all moments, are analogies to be picked apart.) As three years turned to two, turned to one, turned to months and then weeks, the strength of anticipation grew--not unlike the speed at which the distant lovers danced toward one another. And, much like a one night stand, this would all be a brief moment in passing. Until it wasn’t. Weeks turned to months, one year to two, turned to three. And the light from this newborn star grew. And its mass grew. And its gravity along with it. And two stars that had become one began to reach out across space, pulling everything in, swallowing anything that could be put in the flames of its mouth. We’d waited billions of years to see a part of our past from thousands of years before now. A temporary moment of brightness in the night sky. But it wasn’t just the brightness that grew, and it took us a few years to figure that out. Like the clarity of time spent with another that only decades and loss bring about. When they told us, in the news, that this star in the night sky appeared to be getting closer, that we had nothing to worry about, that these things exist on timelines too long to envision, that we’d still have thousands and thousands of years before we’d ever see a direct effect, that the most significant thing would be the loss of trust in and brightness of the North Star... It all put perspective to how we--as a collective--we were simply just a moment in passing. Us, here, out on our galactic one night stand. Everything is so bright now. And the heat had driven us underground what must have been a year or two ago. Those with the foresight and luck, or paranoia and money. Or money and foresight, paranoia and luck. The floods caused by the warming came and went just as quickly. With the ice melt, the waves rose, but the heat grew, and grew, and grew, and carried the waves away, up into the sky. All that’s left to the surface is a landscape of crumbling brick and concrete buildings, seabeds of skeletons coated in melted plastics, and dust, and the ashes of wooden homes, forests, and modern living. This last Tuesday will be the last Tuesday. Our sun and that once-distant-star-that-was-two-but-became-one will fold into each other by Sunday--at least, in the news, that’s what they told us to expect. By Monday, it’s anticipated that we’ll all be part of the brightest thing in the night sky. For someone. Somewhere. Until they join the gravitational death dance they’ve been part of for billions and billions of years. The way it's been forever.