Light-Year Lovers

A tale of cosmic love

Halley’s comet passes the Earth every 76 years.

Long distance love is never easy. That’s why Halley and Lunar don’t define it as that. They don’t pine after one another, sulking beneath starlight, relentlessly begging for the other’s return. They don’t sit around, waiting for those dastardly 76 years to pass.

Lunar lives his life like he did before she rocketed right into it. He keeps on revolving, he keeps on glowing, he doesn’t plummet deep into Earth’s embrace, begging for advice, weeping into her mountainous shoulders.

He knows Halley is a traveller, a nomad, a wanderer.

There’s no point trying to pin her down when she was quite clearly born to soar across the skies. So instead, whilst she’s out there roaming through space, Lunar blissfully does what he has always done. He busies the nighttime, he chats with the oceans, he inspires humanity on a loop. He goes about his daily motions, his cyclic phases, he lives his life the way he always has; peacefully.

And when Halley returns, even for only a few fleeting moments, they fall in love all over again.

It happens so fast that not even the speed of light can keep up, leaving the entire universe as a motionless speck on her horizon. What Lunar doesn’t know, though, is that Halley only ever returns for him. The cosmos at her disposal but she will never venture too far, not without popping by to see her lover again. Stability might not be her thing, but her love for him is enough to fuel her for entire decades. He encourages her adventures and she admires his passion, and no matter where she might be, she’s tethered to him, lost in his orbit, the very first lunatic there ever was.

Because love, you see, it transcends time and space — and it shimmers. It begins there in place and unfolds outwards, enveloping all that it grazes and cascading into all corners of whatever might be out there.

It thrives — white hot and glistening.