There are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy,
and in the universe, some estimate there are one hundred billion galaxies.
Just by the numbers, it seems pretty crowded,
but in reality, it is lonely, my love, beyond imagination.
Not only is the distance between those stars so vast
that no life could hope to communicate in real time,
that distance grows because the universe is still expanding from the explosion that created it.

Despite this distance, and this loneliness,
the universe is made of celestial connections.
All the stars in the galaxy orbit around the mass at its center,
and each star’s orbit is affected by every other star.
Sometimes galaxies collide; still, with such vast time and space,
the collision goes unnoticed to a single star in those galaxies.
And if one explodes, all the others feel it, but sometimes not for millions or billions of years.

Yet there is one meeting,
where two stars passing,
catch each other and begin a dance—
circling each other, closer and closer until they become one.
These are called binary stars,
and to the rest of the universe,
their spin will look like our love,
a twinkle in the night sky among a hundred billion stars.

~

Author: Derek Robert Delahunt 

Image: Flickr/Ralph Aversen

Editor: Travis May