Later, when our stars were already threading through each other like fingers, I couldn’t help but wonder. When your ex comes back into your life at a hundred and ten kilometers per second, is that romance, or is it just gravity with better lighting?

I want it on record that I was thriving.

A figure that photographed well from any angle, a rotation of satellites, bachelors, who never asked where the night was going, and an address eighty galaxies would kill for.

Four billion years of not needing anybody. Andromeda wasn’t just big. He was Big.

That’s the thing about Big. He doesn’t arrive. He looms. Every astronomer alive covered his approach like Fashion Week, and I’d been pretending not to read a word of it.

“You look good, kid,” he said, when his halo touched mine.

“I’ve been living on Marlboro Lights and spite.”

“Suits you.” He rolled his shoulders, all two hundred and twenty thousand light-years of them, wearing his spiral arms like a suit he’d had cut for the occasion.

“And you?” I said. “Still taking up the night sky?”

“Every night, kid.”

“So how does a man that visible lose two wives?”

“You kept count.”

“The neighborhood kept count. How are the kids? Do they see you, or do they just orbit?”

He smiled the smile. The one that has ruined civilizations, ended dynasties, and gotten a woman to leave a Vogue party in the first twenty minutes. “They know where I am.”

“So did I. Not that it ever got me a phone call.”

That’s the trouble with loving something enormous. You can see it from a hundred blocks away. Still doesn’t make it emotionally available.

He married a black hole with half my luminosity, and I heard about it from a supernova. One of her friends cornered me in the bathroom at the Met. Said nothing. Just aimed every wavelength she had at me and left.

He drifted closer, which at our age is not a choice. It’s physics.

“Careful. You’ll wrinkle the clouds.”

“They’ll live.”

Two words, and everything in this city was a little bit his. We’d both done the math.

“Did you love her?”

“I did.”

He never lied. Not once. He’d hand you the worst thing you’d ever heard like he was passing you a drink.

“You know what I gave up for that? The Sunday Times. Women scoring us over coffee.”

“I know.”

I let it sit.

“Your girl is lovely, Hubble.”

He didn’t get it. He never did. And to think there are women out there right now quoting movies to men who think they made it up.

Every woman I know has an apartment that’s too big for her now. Mine is a hundred thousand light-years across and almost entirely empty. Why is it that the only room you can’t go into is the one he left?

The room had been thinning out while we talked. That’s the danger hour. The lights come up, the crowd goes home, and suddenly you’re texting the guy from 2003 who did that thing you’ve never admitted you liked.

They’d run the numbers, and the answer never changed. He gets here. Not maybe. Not if I’m busy, not if I don’t return the call.

That isn’t a love story. That’s an appointment.

“Four billion years,” I said. “And you pick a Tuesday.”

“It was always gonna be a Tuesday, kid.”

And that is romance. He didn’t cross the void for me. He just didn’t have anywhere better to be. On the Upper East Side, that’s a proposal.

Somewhere out in the suburbs, a small blue planet was up all night worrying about us. There’s a stage in every love story where somebody younger is watching and hoping it works out.

And nobody asks the question in front of her.

Does anybody survive this?

His arm found mine. Here’s the thing nobody warns you about. The touch you brace for and the touch you miss are the same.

I could have moved.

I didn’t.

Galaxies don’t actually collide. Not one star touches. You go straight through the person. And is that closeness, or is that just two people in the same place at the same time?

His clouds found mine, and wherever they met, we lit up. New stars by the thousand. Blue, gaudy, burning too fast, the way a pair of Manolos does after the third Cosmopolitan at Balthazar.

“Slower,” I said.

“You got it, kid.”

He pulled, and I gave him every arm I had.

I’d held them in place since before there was a sun. They let go behind me, like a dress coming undone. I moaned in frequencies only the doormen hear.

Somewhere in the middle, my black hole rolled over and took notice of him and his type, apparently.

A husband takes the apartment, the friends, the good decade. Big was taking my shape. No prenup covers that.

“This is the end of us,” I said.

“I know.”

“They’ll give us one of those names,” I said. “The full Bennifer.”

“Milkdromeda,” he said, and God help me, it worked.

So I stopped holding my shape. That’s all dying is. You stop doing the constant work of being yourself. His halo is my halo now.

Our black holes circle each other, closing, playing the same song all the way down. Two drifters, off to see the world.

In a few hundred million years there will be no him and no me. Just one drowsy golden galaxy full of strangers’ stars, and nothing in it will believe we were ever two.

And just like that, the questions stopped.

~ Ashley Mangtani