Author: Michael Walton

How do the stars feel, you ask? You are right to inquire of one of us – we are the ones who know, after all. You little bags of carbon and water, who can’t even see most of the light that we emit, have no idea how we feel.

How do the stars feel? We feel heat. Stars are great furnaces of hydrogen – and, in our older days, helium, carbon, or even iron. We burn, and every part of us burns so much brighter than it does in you. Our loves span ages. Our feuds last for eons. Our fleeting whimsies outlive entire civilizations of yours. The rage of one such as us is a conflagration that scours whole regions of space. And when two of us come together, it is an orgy of light and fire and passion that makes your most torrid affair seem as the lightest brushing of shoulders on a crowded street. How do we feel? We feel sad for you poor, cold, emotionless things.

How do the stars feel? We feel old. Ten million of your years is mere infancy for such as us. A billion years to us is childhood. Two billion, adolescence. Our spans are so long that, if we but blink, we miss entire generations of you. How do we feel? We feel pity for you fragile, fleeting, impermanent things.

But what do the stars feel most? Imagine how rare it is that we come together. Picture if you can the distances between us, gulfs so great that life on dirt balls like the one on which you live can evolve, fail to prove itself worthy to reach us, and die in the time it takes light from one of us to reach another. Think on this and ask again, how do the stars feel?

Lonely, you heartless little cinders. The stars feel lonely.