The Light from Your Stars

There's a small light on my desk that illuminates with each incoming message from space. It's just a simple light," but I prefer to think of it as my own personal star – one that only shines when you're thinking of me.

I keep a digital calendar on my bedroom wall that displays two sets of dates. The first shows Earth time: October 15, 2147. The second shows what I call "Your time": March 3, 2146. The discrepancy grows larger every day, like a wound that refuses to heal. Sometimes I catch myself staring at both dates until they blur together, wondering which reality is more real.

You're nineteen months into your journey aboard the Stellar Pioneer, though from your perspective, it's only been seven months. I'm twenty-seven now. You're still twenty-four, or maybe twenty-five, depending on how we calculate it. We've stopped trying to calculate it.

The light blinks maybe once every few weeks, each flash bringing a piece of you across the vast expanse of space. Our messages cross like ships passing in the night, carrying fragments of lives increasingly out of sync. I tell you about the new coffee shop that replaced our old favorite hangout. By the time you receive the message, the coffee shop will have already closed down.

Your messages arrive like postcards from the past, heralded by that soft blue glow that never fails to make my heart skip. You describe the view from the ship's observation deck, the way the stars blur into streaks of light when you accelerate. You talk about missing the smell of rain on concrete. I read your words and wonder if you're technically missing something that happened years ago, or if longing transcends the physics of time dilation.

Sometimes, late at night, when the message light hasn't blinked for too long, I stand in my backyard with an old telescope. I know I can't possibly see your ship, but I look anyway. The light reaching my eyes is ancient, having traveled for years across the cosmos. I wonder if that makes the stars I'm seeing younger or older than they actually are. I wonder the same about you.

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Our wedding date remains unset, floating in a quantum state of possibility. I joked in one message that we should pick a date in your timeline, then do the relativistic calculations to figure out when I should show up on Earth. The joke takes three months to reach you. Your laughter, when it finally arrives with a welcoming flash of blue, is from a woman slightly younger than the one who will eventually walk down the aisle.

On my twenty-eighth birthday, the light pulses and brings me a message you recorded on my twenty-seventh. You're holding a cupcake with a candle, singing slightly off-key. The video is timestamped both in Earth time and ship time, like everything we send each other now. I watch it three times, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when the present becomes the past, when memory becomes prophecy.

I've started keeping a journal of things to tell you when you return, knowing that by then, some of my stories will be vintage, others still fresh. Time, I'm learning, is less like an arrow and more like a garden – things growing at their own pace, blooming when they're ready.

At night, I dream of Einstein and love letters crossing light years, of wedding vows aging like fine wine in the space between stars. I dream of you, perpetually young in the photographs I keep, growing older in ways that defy traditional mathematics. I dream of our first dance at our wedding, wondering which one of us will have to catch up to the other's timeline.

In the morning, I write you another message. "The light from your stars," I begin, "takes so long to reach me that by the time I see you shine, you've already moved on to new constellations. But I'm learning to navigate by your afterglow, to plot my course using the ghost light of where you've been. Maybe that's what love is – following someone's light even when time itself tries to pull you apart."

I send the message into space, knowing it will reach a slightly different you than the one I pictured while writing it. The calendar ticks forward, counting two futures that refuse to synchronize. The message light sits dark and patient on my desk, holding the promise of your next transmission. I make another cup of coffee and wait for the light from your star.