In a black sea of ephemera, we are falling.
Two luminescent bodies swim the midnight landscape.
Metallic skeletons push through space-time.
Our spacecrafts are diametrically opposed, traveling perpendicular.
Some divine being from our ancient past extends her grace.
A celestial object flashes in the jeweled sky.
The veil of eternal night is lifted.
For an instant, your form is alight.
Warm faces press against cold windows.
In this everlasting winter, I feel your heat signature.
In my mind, I traverse your cosmology,
lost in a labyrinth of skin.
We are two teenage refugees on passing ships,
on our way to different galaxies.
Our love is estrangement.
We are graph undefined,
two hyperbolas divided by asymptotes,
rushing toward our separate infinities.
We are perpendicular lines on a three-dimensional plane,
never destined to intersect.
Still, we meet, just to smite Euclid.
In a millisecond, you leave me.
Your image loiters like a mirage—
fading fonder, fading faster.
Until even traveling at light speed,
I cannot reach you.
Our love is red-shifting.
I float through soundproof corridors,
lost in liminal, screaming in lowercase.
Only churning machinery disrupts this monastic silence.
My inner world pulses with illusory intrusions.
Across frayed edges of my mind,
I feel your spectral sensations.
How else to distinguish this temporal haze—
these ebony nights and ivory days?
Our memoir is ghostwritten in the unconscious,
across daydreams and lapses in judgment.
Our love is phantom.
Perhaps some cosmic quandary conspires against our love.
In the quantum realm,
are your particles entangled with another?
Have you some other paramour,
whose gravitational pull is stronger?
Did her cosmic ray pierce your heart,
and atomize your head?
Does her icy inferno last longer?
No space siren can separate us.
I lie in wait among the nebula,
where her star expires and mine emerges.
Our love consumes everything with its hunger,
and gives back nothing.
Our love is a black hole,
from which even light cannot escape.
Between us, there lies a distance occupied by nothing and everything—
by a canvas of speckled black,
by the cold fabric of space-time,
by the universe and her material.
Our love is empty space.
Our love is chasm.
Find me in the dark matter,
where zero divides into itself,
and starships vanish without a trace.
I linger in the negative space, dematerialized,
waxing and waning, and waiting for you.
Our love is vacuum.
Our love is void.
But our forever is not so long.
In time, I will lose you.
I will lose you to stardust,
distilled into the elements from which we are made and unmade.
I will lose you to space-time expansion,
to invisible forces pulling from the margins, rupturing the continuum.
I will lose you to the heat death of the universe,
born from primordial oceans of fire,
ending when stars exhaust their fuel and orbits decay.
Until absolute zero reigns and time loses directionality,
we find each other in the space between,
arms outstretched toward ever-fading possibilities.
Our love is counterfactual reality.Kya Brooks ’25 (kyabrooks@college.harvard.edu) eagerly awaits her own extraterrestrial romance.