I was walking my dog when I saw my wife for the first time, dancing on the grass in the park like it was an ancient meadow. There was no music—just the clink of her dangling moon earrings as she spun. I think I fell in love with her then, when all I knew of her was wild rhythm and the way she turned her face up to the sun.
She never hid herself from me. Our first morning together, she told me about the time before—when infinite space was filled with shimmering rainbows and delight. She said she was something else.
I gave her a kiss, and then another, and we never did eat breakfast that day.
We went to the planetarium every Friday for three years straight so she could watch their show on the birth of the universe. When the show stopped running, I talked with the theater manager and purchased the recording. I gave it to her on the anniversary of our first date.
I set up a projector in our living room, so we could lie on the sofa and stare up at the ceiling to watch the universe expand. As we snuggled amid stardust and comets, she turned into my arms. She kissed my cheeks, my chin, the dip between my breasts. She whispered against my belly, “Marry me?”
Our wedding ring stones were meteorites. Our honeymoon was in the desert, in a dark sky reserve where we could watch galaxies glow.
She didn’t like watching anything on a screen that used RGB lighting. She said it felt wrong, to see things with no violet in them. Sometimes, she would tell me where a rainbow would be in an hour. We’d drive out to spot it, and revel in the colors.
It felt like she was pulling me into the future I craved. It felt that way our whole lives together. I knew there were joys to come, and when they appeared I knew that if I followed her lead the next joy was moments away. It was an exhilarating way to live.
I always had a feeling that she checked her speed to stay with me. Because she loved me. Because we were partners, and she had decided that this joyous, chaotic, wonderful life was worth slowing down to savor.
I loved watching her face change over the years— first came laugh lines around her eyes, then a sprinkling of age spots forming tiny constellations on her cheeks. Her eyebrows turned white, and it made her eyes look like an ocean with soft clouds floating above.
She was beautiful. I wanted to watch her change forever. I wanted to know who she would be at the end of time.
One morning over our toast and cocoa, she showed me a news article on her holo-reader. “I want to do this,” she said.
The article talked about how there were commercial space flights available now—ones that could take you past the asteroid belt. Small, private spaceships could make the trip in a week, while larger cruises took anywhere from a month to a year.
“Please.” She reached out to gently trace the swollen, arthritic knuckles on my hand. “I need to go.”
I felt it then—the way she was pulling me to a wondrous future. But this time, tears formed somewhere wise within me. I knew—I just knew – that this would be the last joy we would share.
She kissed my thinning hair. “Love. Let’s go stargazing together one last time.”
We booked a private charter with a discreet company. We passed the moon and kept going until we were through the asteroid belt, in an isolated spot far from any interesting stellar body, where no other ships would spot us.
I hugged her in the corridor. She was shaking. I wanted to hold her back, keep her tight in my arms as I informed her this had gone far enough.
She gave me a kiss, tender the way only a life of love about to end can be tender. The kind of tender that breaks and heals and breaks and heals your heart on loop forever after. Then she entered the airlock, and secured the door between us. I wanted to bang on the window. I wanted to scream, wrench her back, tell her we were going home.
But.
She was something else. She’d always been something else. This wasn’t my decision to make.
And she…
She dove into space. No helmet, no suit. She swam through the zero-g void as though she belonged there.
I watched from the window. My love. My wife. She was glowing. Rainbows were under her skin… and then they were her skin. Her hair became a comet’s tail. Her body was light that danced, and even in this form I recognized her moves. Her sense of rhythm had always been barely human. She’d been made of starlight all along.
On the flight home, the pilot wouldn’t meet my eyes. We didn’t speak. I’m not sure I could have formed words anyhow.
Could I have kept her with me for longer? Perhaps.
Had she done the right thing? Yes. The right thing for her, at least.
Some small, certain part of me was at peace with letting her go.
But, oh. Oh. When I lay in my bunk and stared at the ceiling… what I would have given to watch the universe begin with her again.
I think I had believed that when one of us moved on the other would follow shortly. Somehow, I survived.
I forgot and made her a cup of cocoa, extra chocolatey with three marshmallows, only to have to dump it out in the sink.
I rolled over to hug her and found air.
I looked up from my book to tell her about a passage, and saw an empty chair.
But somehow, I survived.
Years of breakfast by myself passed. I still had a membership to the planetarium, and I read their newsletter faithfully every month.
A new nebula has been discovered. Astronomers claim it appeared without warning in a distant quadrant. Scientists are currently trying to explain a pattern of energy bursts coming from the nebula’s core.
“It’s like it has a pulse,” one researcher said.
I watched the video attached to the newsletter, and my breath caught. I knew those moves. I reached out to touch my holo-reader, tracing her beautiful, star-dazzled body.
There was no music. Just the glimmer of suns, planets, lifetimes to come. My wife spun.
Sarah Grace Tuttle (they/she) is an autistic, queer, polygender author and poet. Their speculative writing has been published in Worlds of Possibility, Eye to the Telescope, Adventitious, and more. You can visit them online at http://www.sarahgracetuttle.com to keep up with all their writerly joys and chaos.
Translunar Travelers Lounge 