#edit: wanna clarify i directly added some lines from the song into this as a reference; it was intentional

[shalomniscient]

[recommended song: albireo by rokudenashi.]

you love her.

it’s something you’ve always known, really. you’ve loved her since you were kids, sitting on her roof and looking at the stars. you loved her and she loved the stars. they flickered in her eyes every time she would point them out—cassiopeia, orion, pegasus, leo, among many others. she spoke of them like they’re old friends, sharing their stories with you, but most of the time you would get too lost in the sound of her voice to pay attention. you would wish she’d speak your name in that tone.

it’s on a clear night, both of you still in your school uniforms, when she tells you about binary stars. “they’re caught in each others’ gravity,” she explains, grinning, golden eyes as bright as the fiery red of her hair, and you remember thinking it feels familiar. you remember relating. you’ve let yourself get pulled along by her orbit for years now—so much so you think that maybe, without her gravity, you might just fall apart. thne she tells you about albireo; a binary star. points it out to you amongst all the other little lights that hang from the heavens. the glint of albireo’s component stars overlap with each other just like how her fingertips brush yours, and the heat expansion of the universe pulses forward with each beat of your heart. your world gets bigger for every second you spend by her side.

but you learn she’s more like a comet than a star. upon the scale of a human eye, a star is stationary. unmoving. permanent. and she is anything but. there’s a restlessness in her, a longing, but it’s different from yours. the gravity she moves along is not from another—not from you—but from the stars beyond even what is known. she wants to dance from system to system, to know the warmth of a star as she passes by but never to stay. and so you find that part of you isn’t surprised when she says she’s leaving, to venture forth onto the starry rail and the path of a god long gone. “i’ll miss you,” she says, her golden eyes warm with sincerity as she takes her hands in yours, and you want to tell her you will too, but the words lodge in your throat stubbornly. you can only manage them after she’s gone, nothing but a shining light in the sky, but the words burn up in the stratosphere before they reach her.

you still love her.

a year after she departs, a discovery is made. albireo is a false binary—its component stars are light years apart, made to seem close by the illusion of spacetime. you don’t know if you want to laugh or cry at the irony. a binary star that never was, and a love that never was. close enough to taste, far enough to miss. you want to ask her for your heart back, but you don’t even know where you’d put it. she’s had it for so long, even if she doesn’t know. it’s always been hers. so you swallow down the ache in your throat like a burning star, and pick up the phone with a smile when she calls.

(in the distance, albireo shines down on you, alone.)