There was a time when she and I orbited the same small star.
We had been pulled together years earlier—two lonely planets caught in each other’s gravity, spinning close enough that our atmospheres brushed and sparked. For a long while, it felt like home. We shared nights lit by the same constellations, whispered secrets across the void, and believed our twin orbit would last forever.
But slowly, almost too slowly to notice at first, something shifted.
Her gravity grew heavier. What used to feel like a gentle tug became a relentless pull. Every conversation left me dimmer, as if pieces of my light were being siphoned away. My oceans receded. My skies clouded. I began to feel the unmistakable drag of a black hole wearing the mask of a friend.
I told myself it was normal. Orbits wobble sometimes. Stars flare. I adjusted my path, tilted my axis, tried to shine brighter to compensate for what was disappearing. I stayed, because leaving felt impossible—like escaping an event horizon you’re already too close to see.
Yet the universe is patient. It doesn’t force; it only nudges.
One quiet season, I felt the faintest push—an outward drift I didn’t create. A conversation left unanswered. A plan quietly canceled. A silence that stretched longer than before. Instead of panic, I felt… space. Room to breathe. The pull was still there, but weaker, like tides loosening their grip.
I didn’t fight it.
I let the drift happen.
Day by day, revolution by revolution, our paths curved away from each other. No explosion, no dramatic slingshot—just the soft, inevitable widening of two orbits that had served their time. She continued toward whatever star now called her. I arced gently in another direction, feeling the warmth of a sun I hadn’t realized was waiting.
It took longer than I expected to stop looking back. Some nights I still searched the sky for her familiar silhouette against the stars. But each time, the view was clearer. Cleaner. My own light returned, steady and unborrowed.
Now, when I gaze upward, the sky feels impossibly wide. There are no shadows eclipsing my moons, no unseen force bending my trajectory. Just open dark, scattered with a million quiet lights—some close, some distant, all free to choose their own paths.
I am no longer caught in anyone else’s collapse.
I have my own sun again. I have my own sky. And it is vast, and it is mine.