Doughnuts, Goosebumps, and Me

When they asked you to become a satellite, of course you said yes. For someone as curious as you, what could be better than an eternity of disembodied wandering through an infinite universe? You didn’t think of doughnuts, or goosebumps, or me, or any of the small pleasures of a human life until later when someone cut you off in traffic on the way home, and even though you were fine, you were thrown, very suddenly, back into your terrestrial life.

You will miss them––doughnuts, goosebumps, and me––of course, but not enough to change your mind.

I want you to remember a few things. On our first date, you took me to your backyard. You overcooked the hamburgers and spent all night pointing at different constellations with your ten-inch telescope. I saw the rings of Saturn for the first time with my own eyes that night. It was blurry and distant and stunning. You were crystalline and insistent.

Falling in love with you was like falling into orbit. No crash, just the gentle assurance of gravity tugging on my sleeve as we ran barefoot into the December Atlantic. You hated winter, but loved Orion, especially on the beach, so we froze our toes and lips blue watching him, and then you dragged me into the break.

Instead of a ring, I saved up for VR glasses, and when I wanted you to know that I’d love you as long as you’d have me, I slipped them over your head and held your hand as you walked along the arm of the Milky Way, tiptoeing over solar systems and supernova. You took them off and you were so happy there were tears.

When you came home late from work, I could see the equations still lingering in your irides. Little numbers and variables danced and fluttered. I loved watching them dissolve as we danced in the kitchen, something burning in the oven as we swayed.

We’d walk around the block, hands clasped together, laughing at nothing until the stars came out. You once told me you were sorry that you got lost in the stars so often, guilty for staring silently at the sky. I hope you remember what I told you: that I don’t lose you to the stars, I find you in them. Watching you marvel at space was like watching atoms fuse together.

And oh, love, when you turned those eyes to me, still strung with stars, and studied my face. When you loved me with the attention of a telescope. No one has ever been so seen.

Lights from the city encroached farther each month. Soon, our everynight sky was coated in orange. The stars struggled to peer out from behind the curtain. You’d work and focus, and each day you’d fall asleep a little smaller without your own piece of sky to study. You got some comfort, I think, in conjuring the stars through equations, but it was never the same.

On vacations we’d go to dark skies parks, hauling a telescope and canned beans across the country in a car that was always breaking. We saw the world, trying to see the sky. We’d wake at dusk and trace the stars together. On nights it rained, we’d hike, or fish, or read. When I couldn’t sleep in the silence, you’d tell me the history of the universe until I dozed off.

It was all so perfect.

You took a new job at Compass because they owned three of the world's five largest telescopes and they would let you use them all at your discretion. On your first day, you didn’t come home for 48 hours. This would happen often, and I would miss you, sure, but I had my own life, too. I’d pick myself daffodils on my morning walk, make a cappuccino and sip it slowly in front of the crossword puzzle. I never loved my work like you loved yours, but I liked it well enough, and I could do it all from home. I’d eat lunch in the park and laugh at comedy albums I played in my headphones, and I’d visit friends and drink with them and talk a little too much about you.

Yes, the world was ending all the time. Your parents moved into an apartment near us because their city was struck with permaflood. My sister moved to New Zealand, to be with her fiancee, and to flee the fires turning her hometown into a desert. Yes, the air was thicker, the sky less visible, the waters higher, the temperature warmer, yes, yes, yes. What could I do but love you through it all?

When Compass announced it was going to renew the mission of Voyager, and send the most ambitious deep space probe ever created into the galaxy, you were ecstatic. It was a noble mission, to explore the universe for the sake of exploring the universe. I was more skeptical. It looked like just another billionaire looking at space as an extractable resource, but they had selected you to lead the team, which meant a lot, and you believed in them, which meant more. You worked yourself to the marrow those first months. I swear I could hear you thinking through problems in your sleep, long trails of equations fluttering like swallows while you rested. You were indefatigable, though, always up before sunrise and out of the house before seven.

You’d leave me coffee, warm in a thermos by our bedside table. Most mornings you wrote me a note, too. I still remember my favorite, just one equation: (x^2+y^2-1)^3-x^2y^3=0. I drew two axes and graphed its shape: a heart. I framed that note and kept it on my desk. You never ran out of ways to love me.

As the project grew, you told me it had become obvious that without a driver, the mission would never reach its full potential. You hired some of the best minds working in AI, people as passionate about consciousness as you were about stars to help build you one.

As smart as they were, it didn’t work. They couldn’t program a pilot with the one thing the mission really needed: curiosity. The path out of the solar system was clear, and could be programmed, the next closest star, too. But from there, where, in the infinite void of space, would it choose to go? Compass wanted a probe that would explore, in the truest sense of the word, and they could not program curiosity.

They could not make from scratch a consciousness that loved space as much as you did. So they did the next best thing: they asked you. Of course the probe couldn’t support life, as we understand it, but it could support code. The programmers had turned to finding a way to upload your consciousness into the probe’s central processor. When they asked you, and they asked you first, before anyone else, all the technology was ready.

By the time you got home, you were already crying. I held you, tighter and tighter the more you told me. I didn’t dare change your mind. I couldn’t have, and though I already missed you, I wouldn’t have wanted to. They let you enjoy your last year without work.

I tried hard, that final year, to enjoy the time we had: To marvel at the bioluminescent algae off the coast of New Zealand, when we visited my sister; To savor the shape of your lips, and the way your arms wrapped all the way around me when you kissed me; To not miss you when I still had you. Loving only in the present tense is hard. We practiced and got better, but it was never easy.

Then it was time. The probe was ready, and so were you. You kissed me, finally, and entered the extraction chamber and I never saw you again. I watched you, now a body of steel and a mind of binary, take off and break the atmosphere. I watched you leave Earth and begin your endless journey, and my heart broke and soared all at the same time.

They say they don’t know what it will do to you, being without a body, existing in a way that no one has ever existed before. I appreciate their honesty. Still, they let me send you this message to listen to as you voyage.

If you remember me, Starshine, if you still love me, I still love you too.

They tell me that your design is so elegant that the probe can last as long as the universe does, feeding off the energy the universe expends to stretch wider and wider every moment. As our world craters and shakes, it is nice to know one thing for certain. No matter what happens to us, one of us will always be looking at the stars. No matter what happens, one of us will always be wandering, cataloging an endless horizon. If you are doubtful, I hope this comforts you. If you miss home, remember doughnuts; remember goosebumps. If you are as heartbroken as I am, remember me. If you are listening, I love you.

________________

You will be an old man when you receive this. You are a middle-aged man now, but light only travels so fast in this wide universe. I always thought you were born to be wrinkled and wise. I can only imagine how handsome you must be, these days. Of all that I lost when I left, the joy of watching you age ranks high.

I have been watching a planet form from the tidal forces of two stars passing near one another. They pull and condense the stray matter between them. Each gives a piece of themselves to the other, and in the middle, a planet is born. After the planet forms, the stars will disentangle and continue their orbit. We were like this. Between our lives’ spinning spheres, when our orbits intersected for just a moment in the cosmic ocean, love formed like a planet.

As they spin apart, the planet will follow one of them. It is possible it will follow both, twisting in an infinite loop between them. It will look like this: r=√cos(2⋅θ). Perhaps our love is like this, too, a gift we pass to one another from great distances. I would like to think so, as I wander.

If I am tremendously lucky, one century, I will watch life crawl from the magma here or somewhere and know humanity was never alone in the universe. I will be here for a long time, perhaps millions of years. Who knows how many times I will have played your message and thanked you for it by then?

Right now at this moment, the cosmic furnaces are trapped between one another, and swirling between them is an ever densening cloud of iridescent gas and stone.

When I left my body, the last thing I thought of was your face as we said goodbye. We were both so sad, and yet your eyes were ablaze with love. I woke in this new form with that image still playing in my mind. It is frozen there, and unlike a human memory, it will never degrade. With those eyes, I know that I can explore this universe forever.

Oh, it is beautiful here, my love, cold and empty and stunning. The huge blank stretches of the universe make moments like this all the more powerful. Out of nothing, out of the wide empty: quasars and supernovae and suns and stars and light and life.

Though you are old, I wonder if you remember, as I like to, the moment I fell in love with you. We were standing by the ocean, as we so often did, and the sky was covered in clouds. I had not smiled in days, dark as it was that winter.

“Look,” you said, pointing to the black stretch of night. “There’s Sirius.” You pointed right where it would have been on a cloudless night. “It’s so bright you can see it even when it isn’t there.”

One by one the stars came through as you conjured them. We traced constellation after constellation from memory. Soon the whole sky was shining, strung with a thousand imagined stars. In bed, I closed my eyes and saw them there, still, twinkling.

I think of that sky, and you, often, and hope you still see me behind the clouds.

If you wish to place me in your sky, here are my coordinates: 6 degrees and 45 minutes right ascension, and -16 degrees 43 minutes declination. If there is still space for me on the tapestry of your closed eyes, that is where you can find me.

To tell you the truth, I never find myself thinking of doughnuts and goosebumps. Yet––do not worry––I think always of you.