And then, blood gushing out of dying stars, you cant keep up and the terrors you loved steal what you need to breathe. Vermillion, ruby, scarlet. Blood in the form of crystals raining from black clouds. The rings of your moon swirl until you only see the rainbows. The oxygen is violet and dances with the clouds. Come back to me.

You begged them. Let me live let me live let me live. Breathe, star-child, breathe and the sun is yours. You tried to tell them, to tell the grass and the leaves and the flowers in the red vase. Tell them, little star, how an asteroid took your favorite pencils.

The earth spins so fast you can’t see your feet and they still won’t let you live. You try to run, run to something more familiar, but you don’t really know if you’re running or walking or standing still. None of it matters much. Only matter matters and you were never one of us. Live, star-child, live.

The galaxy won’t let you, not until you return to your hometown where she loved you for a summer and left craters in your heart. She was like an asteroid in that way, and in the way she crashed and burned in your backyard, taking your sister’s roses with her.

In the middle (after the beginning, because it’s chronological, that’s what it is):

This is really it. That's all we are. The heat of your hand on mine, the dried salt of tears on your cheek, your bright red mug on the mantelpiece, the stamps in the box under our bed. You loved too many things. That’s why you fell in the first place, wasn’t it? That's all we are, each other and the things we collect to pretend we mean something.

But if we are the things we love then can I say I am you? Imagine if I told you that. You’d throw the blue mug at me, wouldn’t you? Because you always preferred to break things than let go. I still wouldn’t know how you feel.

The earth sighed when we met, I know because she told me. “Stay, stay right there and love as you will,” she told me. The galaxy had been holding its breath until the moment my arm grazed yours on the train. This is it, the planets murmur, this is where they’re supposed to be. This is all it’s supposed to become.

Jupiter, Neptune, Mars, the stars we cannot see, inhale and exhale, relief in stardust. Saturn’s rings turned and turned and turned before it stopped on that Tuesday morning. You held a sandwich, and I had that book of poetry from my mom.

Then there’s the interlude (because even the galaxy pauses):

A yawn, tired sighs, weary breaths. Everything is quiet. Pause, pause for a moment and look at what you have. The flowers and the books, the fire and the posters, glued together by you. It’s all you. Red on green, white on black and a stranger in an old apartment.

Shh, star-child, they will come for you yet.

Here’s how it ends (a full stop at the borders of what we know, screams from only the terrors):

The black hole at the edges of what you loved and love gets bigger. Inside is a paradise that couldn’t compare to the press of her lips against yours. There’s a picket fence and a rose bed and you always smile even when she stops saying “I love you.” It doesn’t hurt, not the way it did when the blue mug broke.

Somewhere between her kisses and man-made paradise a guru with calloused feet holds you close and breathes creation into your lungs, filling your craters with the stardust he kept in his fingertips.

“Star-child. This is it, haven’t you heard? This is all of it and nothing more,” the guru says. His voice is gravel in your ears and you ask him to sing. He mixes a green leaf and scarlet flowers in a bowl, singing a lullaby about a mother that wasn’t like mine. He puts them in a cup and the colors become familiar, like how I made you coffee in the evenings.

The earth spins in that black hole, but it gets slower and slower. The brakes of my pickup screech on the ice. You screamed at me and told me to love more things, more people. How could I ever do that? How could I when I never learned how to?

Imagine if my mother saw us now. You, wishing it never happened; and me, still hoping the black hole turns white.

You ran out to the ice and she still won't let you breathe, and the dreams and the nightmares are in hand in hand, and the guru tells you love was never an option. “Breathe, star-child. Asteroids can’t hurt you when you love them.”

“How about if I pretend to?” you ask the guru. “Pretend to love and care. Should I make pancakes for the asteroid?”

The guru takes your hands and places a crystal in them. Vermillion, ruby, scarlet. The galaxy tells you what you wanted was ever an option. The crystal tells you this is the best it’s going to be.

And when it starts again (because the universe speaks in cycles):

I say sorry. But it’s to the heavens instead. They say nothing back, but I expected it, because you didn’t either. These are the things that nightmares don’t understand. Apologies and forgiveness, how people create and destroy and revive even when they shouldn’t. How we manage to love even if the finish line was in sight.