You’re twelve when you get the first message. You’ve been fiddling with your homemade radio, trying different diodes tumbled from that chunk of meteorite your uncle Laurence gave you. Something that you know is a song starts coming through. It doesn’t sound like a song in the way that we conceive of songs, but it feels like one. Her voice follows, and this, this, you can understand.

“Is anyone there? Hello? Can you hear me?”

She sounds like the sky, and your cheeks are wet with tears you don’t remember shedding. Your heart bobs up toward your throat, weightless. The message keeps repeating. You bring your hands away from the radio and mark down the frequency on your tablet. You take as many pictures as you can bear, you try to record her, but when you play it back the noise is incomprehensible. From the base of your neck, your heart is weeping openly, shuddering with a violence that scares you, shuddering like it’s trying to send a message back.

🜨

You spend six years trying that yourself, with store-bought walkie-talkies, the radio station’s setup, borrowed lab equipment. With each, you find that magic frequency and wait to see if your heart starts to make you sob. It doesn’t work, and doesn’t work, and doesn’t work, until it does. The feeling of weightlessness under your skin, acute awareness of the empty spaces in you.

“I hear you! I heard you! Who are you? Please, I want to hear you again.”

🜨

The response is four years later. In that time, you’ve applied to master’s programs, moved out, went on a disastrous date with a woman from your poetry seminar. Sitting with her across the table, all that you could think of was the way that other voice had made you feel, the loss of gravity, the pull of void, the soft brush of invisibility. Nothing else has made you feel like that, starmade, inevitable. Fragile and impossible. As soon as you were able to, you bought the advanced radio equipment, brought it home, and tuned it to the station that felt right. It’s still here, in the corner. You abandon dinner when that same song-not-song noise starts.

“Adelaide. I’m Adelaide. I—I miss you, too. It takes you so long to reach me. I’m sorry. I don’t know who you are, but I know you. I recognize you, and I don’t know how. Tell me everything, every atom. I’m sorry that I can’t bend time to hear you better.”

You’re kneeling, supplicant, head bowed, heart insistent at your brainstem. “I’m Penny,” you manage. “And I think about you all the time. I’m from New Mexico, and I grew up looking at the stars but I…I didn’t think they’d answer. Where are you, Adelaide? I want to know you, too. I think I’m meant to.”

🜨

You think about Adelaide every day for three more years. You draft her letters, write her name in sketchbooks, dedicate your thesis to her, to the voice of a woman you will someday meet. In that time, you’ve tried to triangulate her, tried to trace the radio waves back, and back, and back, but you lose them at the heliopause, even with the university’s best tools. When anybody asks about the letters, you tell them you have a pen pal, someone from elementary school.

It’s good to keep in touch with old friends, the inquisitor will say. And they leave it at that.

You’re just about to go and catch a train when the equipment in the corner stops you dead. Adelaide’s voice draws you nearer, and you wish you had prepared a speech, the letters ramble on too long, this is earlier than you expected her—

“I’m from…I call it Fain, I don’t know what you would call it. I don’t know what a New Mexico is, Penny. I think I’m very, very far. But getting closer! I heard you more quickly that time than I did before. I’d been. Getting myself ready for when you came through but then! You were here sooner!! I had questions, I had things to tell you—Penny, Penny, I wish I could see you. Maybe…maybe that will one day come to pass, but until then, dear Penny, tell me what the stars look like. Here, I’ll say mine.

“I look straight up and I see Meridan, the great red giant that’s part of Hawk’s right wing. Meridan is my polar star, the one that stays, stuck onto the backdrop of the ever-sliding sky. And then, there’s Loche, the left hand of the Devil, white-hot and close on the horizon. Capricorn is the same, I think, for you and me. I bet I don’t see him when you do, though. “What does your sky see, pretty Penny mine?”

You call your family and say that you’ll be there tomorrow morning rather than tonight. They’re annoyed, but you cite an assignment due on Monday, one which you have done, but they don’t know that. You take a breath and forget all the letters, letting yourself be overcome with the gravity of Adelaide, the skyward pull of her.

“I…I see Orion, and Betelgeuse on his shoulder. I could, I mean, when I was little. I live in the city, now. So it’s harder to see. But I remember a few. Sirius, the dog, and Castor, one of the twins. We make up stories about our stars. Adelaide sounds like a name from one of those stories, almost. You feel so big. Impossible, beautiful, impossible. I can see Aldebaran still, from my apartment, and Venus, too, bright enough to be a second moon.

“You feel as big as they feel to me, maybe greater, maybe like Jupiter, pulling at the Sun. I don’t know what you look like, but I think of you like the stars. I’ll let you know what to look for, in the event of your ‘maybes’. I’m taller than most of the people my age, according to my friend Vick. I’m not a natural redhead, but everyone thinks I am because my father is Irish and a redhead. My hair is darker, a mix between brown and auburn that sometimes looks like blood. I dye it though, back to that natural red that fits my father nicely.

“My eyes are so dark brown that I can use them as a double mirror sometimes. You know how—well. People here say you can never see yourself, not really. All you see are reflections of yourself. Your whole self at least. I look into a mirror and look into my eyes and I can see myself for real. Does it negate? A reflection of reflection? I’m…sorry that I’m asking you weird questions, now. I wish that I could talk to you forever, fill in all the airspace.”

Sometime before she answers, you whisper into the radio one night: “I think I love you, Adelaide.”

🜨

One year and a few weeks later. Adelaide’s radio—you can’t think of it another way—has been made portable, rests like a worrystone in the pocket of your favorite jeans. You’re out with Ralph and Martha, friends from your thesis program. Root Beer Floats all around, the chatter of the store nearly loud enough to drown out Adelaide as she comes through. This time, thank God, you feel her, first. Your heart tidally locking with hers, longing to spin in tandem on some far-off world. You excuse yourself abruptly, and your friends roll their eyes. They still think your “alien pen-pal” is bullshit.

“Oh, Penny, I wish you could be here. I can see myself, not a reflection. An act of contortion that you couldn’t possibly conceive. I want to show you, Penny. I can picture you, now—thank you, by the way, for that. I’m imagining your hair, both blood and sunset all at once. Your face…the way that your nose would twitch when you smile, the space-deep of your eyes, the soft set of your mouth.

“I want to map your stars onto my self, make Orion’s shoulder part of mine, put Sirius at my thigh, and Castor as my shadow. Aldebaran over my heart. Better to see with than eyes, sometimes. My sky seems so strange without your stars, even if they’ve never ever been there. My sky has seemed strange for a few turns, now. I wonder. I wonder.

“I think I see Venus, too, but maybe I’m making that up, my eyes fooling me in trying to get closer to you. I’m much closer now, and I feel selfish, for wanting to be close. For pulling you with my gravity, even though I don’t quite mean to. I feel you pulling back, you know. The star to my planetary mass. You feel like light, whenever your voice comes through.

“I hope I can understand what you’re saying when you’re right in front of me, Penny.”

You once had hoped that one day, you’d get over the unbearable depth of feeling that Adelaide’s voice drags out of you. Now—eyes red, face damp, slumped on a bench outside of Sugarcones’, portable radio held against your chest—now you know you couldn’t bear its absence. You hold her words in your head, going over them, a homemade spell, and head back into the ice cream shop. Martha and Ralph look worried, taking in your hysterically blissful dishevelment.

“Shit, Pen, you okay?” Martha asks, a little tentatively.

“Oh,” you say, coming back to yourself a little more fully. “Good news from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while. We went to summer camp together, and her internet is screwy a lot of the time.” The lie is easy. Adelaide feels close enough that this could be the case, if you ever went to summer camp, and if Adelaide weren’t someone living in the stars. Martha and Ralph leave it at that.

When you get home, you collapse onto the floor by the radio. “I’m sorry this one will take a little longer, I couldn’t call you back right then, I—.” You laugh, a little breathlessly, stopping yourself.

“It’s like calling, I guess, a little bit, right? What we’re doing? God, what am I doing? People think I’m a little crazy, Adelaide. I tell them I have a pen pal, or an old friend from summer camp. I hope that I don’t forget that that’s not the case, that you’re—that we—I hope I don’t forget what’s real about us. I’m scared that nobody else will think you’re real. But I know you are. I know. I know you’re getting closer.

“The sky is moving. I’ve been reading physics journals as a break from my thesis. Pluto went missing, pulled away by something stronger than the Sun. They found it again, but it’s too far. It hasn’t been on the news yet. My old intro physics teacher says that laypeople would freak out, which is fair. People freak out over everything. I’m not freaking out, though. Because I know that it’s you.

“Do you know what your voice does when I hear it? My heart presses up against my ribs, breaks through my throat and gives orders to my tongue and to my mind. I can’t bear it, I couldn’t bear the loss of it. How can I be light, if you do this? Aren’t you, too? Ah, shit, I had started to plan this message, since I couldn’t respond right away, but I’m going way off script, ha.

“I want you to be selfish, Adelaide. Pull me and I’ll follow if I can. I’ve been following you for most of my life, like we’ve been orbiting. I want you closer, too. Please.”

🜨

A month or so later, in the middle of the night, the radio wakes you up. “Oh,” Adelaide says. “Penny.” In the still, quiet room, you can hear her breathing. “Penny, I love you.” And oh, you had forgotten about the whisper you had slipped in after your last message. In your dreams, you are kissing the sun. Or maybe you are the sun, and somebody is kissing you. You don’t hear Adelaide, because nothing your brain can make compares to Adelaide, but you assume her in the way we assume shapes in darkness.

After five months of dreaming, you hear Adelaide again.

“Penny, I think I can see your stars. Over the horizon, a man with a red giant on his shoulder is rising, and there’s a star so bright it has to be your sun that’s getting nearer. It makes me feel a little bit like you do, Penny, seeing the star that wants to burn you down to carbon ash creep closer and closer, like time, like a tide.

“I feel you, too, before I hear you. The promise of a supernova, the electric kiss of fusion. A binary system, a cold star and a burning one, circling. Destined to meet. You’ll see my sky soon, too. I’ll tell you what to look for:

“The Devil, fifteen stars. Loche, his left hand, raised in false foreswearing. Alhem the Seer with her glittering shroud and crystal ball. The Bee, four stars. The friendly face in the night. Fin and the Wolf, my Orion and Scorpius. You’ll know them if they come to cross your sky.

“My ‘maybe’s are more than definite, if you believe your physics. So, I will tell you what else to look for: the empty space in my left ankle, the opalescence of my hair, the nervous way I knit my hands together. The softness when I speak about you, the way I turn and orbit on your every word. I want you to know every particle of me, star-marrow and liquid oxygen.”

You’re slumped against the wall next to the radio. The ground beneath you feels abruptly strange, and you shudder, the late afternoon gone suddenly cold.

“I’ve wanted to know every bit of you from when I first heard you sing, Adelaide.” Your own voice quavers, and you swear you can see the waves of it washing over the transmitter. “The sky has been different here, too. I’ll look for what you say, the Devil, the Seer, the Bee.

“Adelaide, are we going to die? I know, I know. A stupid question, everyone is. Even the stars. But you know what I mean. When we meet. If I feel like a supernova’s promise and you feel like an endless well of gravity would we even survive each other, face to face?

“The sky is moving, Adelaide, and I don’t know if…I don’t know if I’ll make it. I want to see you more than anything, but I don’t want the world to burn. The predictions are scary, and chances of impact update by the hour. The low numbers are the only reason things haven’t collapsed.

“I want you here more than anything, Adelaide.” Your voice is small. Quiet. “Did I doom the world by loving you?”

🜨

Two months later. You’ve spent your time volunteering, guilt a hungry rat inside your body. Nobody at the soup kitchen bats an eye when you start sobbing profusely out of nowhere. The head of the volunteer workers lets you go home early.

“Penny, Penny, Penny, no, no, no. You haven’t done anything, pretty Penny. Our skies have been moving since before we were both born. I used to be so far away that I would never, ever reach you. It’s happened before, pretty Penny mine, and the world survives. Collision is inevitable, but not always fatal.

“Penny, if I were made up like the universe, I would be full of emptiness, a glitter-dust of everything we see, and all the rest dark and void. You might pass through me like a beam of light. We might pass through each other like a beam of light.

“We’ll end up closer. No matter what, we’ll end up closer. I…I don’t want to touch if that will hurt you, Penny. But I want you closer anyway.”

“Adelaide,” you start, but then you’re overwhelmed, and sob, just sob, into the transmitter. Minutes later you recover. “Adelaide,” you say again.

“When I was little, my uncle found a meteorite buried on his property. It took him nine months to get out of the ground, and on the day he did, I was born. A piece of that meteorite was the first present I got after my name. That’s how I made the radio that found you.

“I have that radio in the apartment. The equipment I’m using now is better, of course, but I’ll never get rid of that one. I heard you sing to me, Adelaide, and I wanted to know everything about you. I still do. I want to hear you sing again. At least one more time. Before… At least one more time over the radio.”

🜨

You don’t have to wait long. A week later every newspaper is heralding asteroid disasters. Adelaide’s radio hums. She sings, again, in that way that you know is song but isn’t song. You reach for her. The words aren’t words, and you can’t parse meaning from them. You listen. She sings for a long, long time. When she stops, you hear panting, like she’s out of breath.

“I’ve been lonely my entire life, Penny. I spent every breath calling out, trying to make sure I wasn’t the only thing alive. And then you answered me. I can’t not love you for that.”

“I wish that I could record your voice, Adelaide. I’ve tried, and it never plays back right. I want to hear you forever, Adelaide. I don’t want to have to wait.”

“I don’t want to wait, either,” Adelaide says, from the radio. “Oh,” she says. A realization.

An emergency alert pops up on your phone. You don’t notice. “Adelaide!” You’re in tears. The pull of Adelaide is so strong you can barely stand.

“Oh. Penny. Penny, I’m here.” And you see Adelaide. The emptiness in her ankle, the opalescence of her hair. She’s pulled toward you, too. She’s not made up like the universe, and neither are you.

You can’t close your eyes. When you collide, you feel fruition. Fragile, impossible. Inevitable, starmade. A supernova’s promise fulfilled. Falling into a well with no escape velocity to speak of. Inconceivable pressure, infinite light, and then nothing at all.