Once upon a time, there was no such thing as time. Then bang!—the first particles, cooling into the first atoms, clumping into the first nebular clouds, collapsing into the first stars, shining out the first light, unspooling over billions of years to make it all happen: the joy, the love, the pain, everything. Don’t ask how. Nobody knows. But here we go.
Once upon a time, I meet a woman named Liz at a taco spot in Venice Beach, California. Her friends have set us up. Liz has traveled around our star twenty-five times. Her last lap was with a guy who turned out to be a bad match for her. Her girlfriends hope I might be a better match. I’ve traveled around our star twenty-six times. On my last lap, I taught fourth grade in New York. The first time I see Liz, she’s bounding into the taco spot, sparking with energy. Her friends introduce us, she slides in next to me, and we share a basket of chips and guacamole. That smile. Those eyes. OK. Joy, love, pain: Here we go.
The very first stars lived like glam-rock musicians: big, bright, loud, and fast. They burned through their fuel in a short few million years, they collapsed, they died young. But in death, life: supernova explosions that spewed the periodic table across the universe. Those elements condensed into our galaxy, our solar system, our star, our planet, our cornfields, our avocado trees, our tomato plants, our chips and guacamole. Each atom on our planet: impossibly ancient, miraculous, forged in stars at their moment of destruction. One thing ends, others begin.
Why Venice Beach, of all places? Because my friends and I had always wanted to hop freight trains across the country. And my friend Will, while visiting Los Angeles, had fallen hard for a woman who lived by the beach. So we rode the rails, we landed in LA, and Will and the woman started dating. (They won’t last more than two trips around our star before she breaks things off.) The woman invited her friend Liz to the taco spot. Will told me I should be there too.
Our star began when a massive cloud of elemental dust and gas collapsed at the edge of a minor spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, the heat and pressure triggering a thermonuclear reaction that, 4.6 billion years later, is still going strong. Unlike those first ancient stars, our star possesses healthy emotional regulation, smashing hydrogen atoms together at a steady 600 million metric tons per second to make helium. Each time four hydrogen atoms collide to create helium, the fusion releases 26.7 megaelectron volts of energy. We experience this as photons, particles that require just over eight minutes to reach our planet and warm our faces and make the magic happen.
Some months after sharing our first guacamole, Liz and I go biking along the Pacific. By now we have had our first laughs, our first kiss, our first night together. I watch her emerge from the waves with her mermaid hair, water glittering from her shoulders like a cascade of jewels. Warm sand. Warm breeze. Seagulls coasting the cathedral ceiling of our sky. Magic, magic, magic. We’ve only known each other a short while, but I’ve only been around our star twenty-seven times, so what do I know?
“I want to marry you,” I blurt.
She says to ask her again after we’ve taken three more trips around our star. “All right,” I tell her. “I will.”
Having grown up in New England, my soul knows the deep phases of each orbit around our star: The sleigh bell chorus of spring peepers from the marsh. The warm planks of a dock in August. The blazing orange of the maple behind the barn. Rabbit prints through the snow. What I can’t sense as deeply is the orbit of our solar system around the spiral of the Milky Way, or the movement of the Milky Way through the universe. Our star shepherds us across the cosmos at over a million miles per hour, all the while making the ride comfortable, bathing us in an invisible sea of subatomic particles as we zip along. Each second, about a hundred billion neutrinos from our star’s core pass through every square inch of our planet, our loved ones, ourselves. We exist inside the atmosphere of our star. We are the caterpillar in the cocoon, the baby in the womb, the jalapeño in the fried popper. Without our star, we would be adrift, untethered, abandoned at the roadside among the Japanese knotweed and the empty nips of Fireball whiskey. But our star’s system is one of connection. Through all the joy, all the love, all the pain—nobody rides alone.
Like our star, Liz and I cannot be at rest. We move to New York. We move to Boston. We move back to Los Angeles to live with Liz’s mother, who has been diagnosed with cancer. On our visit to see my family in Maine that summer, I buy a skein of alpaca wool from a yarn shop on Main Street, then canoe Liz across Flying Pond at night, the surface reflecting the seeming stillness of our galaxy. We pull up to a mossy cove, where Etta James is waiting on a boom box and a string of fairy lights hangs between two hemlocks. Liz and I have traveled more than three times around our star since that day at the beach. I kneel. I ask. She responds by kneeling and asking me back. Yes, yes, yes. We tie rings of alpaca wool around each other’s fingers, then step into our new future by taking off our clothes and wading into the nighttime pond, rippling every star up there but ours.
Once per orbit, our star showers us with maximum photons. The summer solstice: the longest day of the year. In my twenties I mark the date with drunken celebrations. For my thirty-third summer solstice, I mark the date in a three-piece suit at the end of a wooden dock in Crow Wing County, Minnesota. Liz stands with me in her white dress, a bouquet of sunflowers in hand. Our parents watch from a pontoon boat leashed to the dock. Our star warms the planks beneath my bare feet. Liz, too, is barefoot. So is Aunt Mary, our officiant. We tie rings of soft alpaca wool around each other’s fingers. We kiss, we hold hands, we jump. The party follows. Aunt Diane makes a graceful dive, headfirst, hair flying behind her like a silver banner. In come my mother, my father, my brother. Cousins and uncles. Liz’s mother—the cancer more advanced now, causing her visible pain that morning as she helped Liz fix her hair—walks with assistance to the end of the dock in her colorful dress. We don’t know it yet, but this summer solstice, her sixty-fifth, will be her last. She marks the occasion by leaping into the air and joining us in the lake. We tread water together as one, splashing and laughing, weightless in the warmth of our star.
Imagine our star is a disco ball, spinning photons across the dance hall of our solar system. Earth is over there, shimmying its shoulders by the bar. Notice how only a small fraction of our star’s total sparkle washes over our planet. And of those few photons that do light us up, even fewer land in North America. Now zoom in further, to the Venice Beach Boardwalk, where we are walking a week after the winter solstice. Late last night, Liz’s mother took her last breath in the family room, with all of us by her side. Now we are dazed, exhausted, staggering through a morning that is too beautiful and clear, the tourists too happy and healthy. Pain, pain, pain. My father-in-law stops suddenly at a sunglasses stand. He pulls out his wallet and tells us each to buy a pair, on him. Less than 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent of our star’s photons will ever light up the brief flashes of our lives. The percentage drops further around the winter solstice. But, even then, sometimes you need a pair of ten-dollar shades. Sometimes even the darkest days are painfully bright.
Liz and I try for another new beginning. We drive across the country to test out life in New England. Our first summer we take what we can get: Liz, teaching dance and Pilates in Boston, living in her boss’s basement. Me, installing solar panels in Midcoast Maine, living in my mother’s loft. On weekends we meet halfway, in Portland. How does one do life? Is everyone else making it up as they go, like us? Can grief create a hole too large to fill? We are walking the rugged shore of Peaks Island, stacking rocks in columns. We are picking wild blueberries. We are trying.
Installing solar panels in a Maine summer is a sweaty, exhausting job. I work a rooftop on Mount Desert Island, overlooking the emerald Atlantic. I work a camp by a secluded pond, loons calling out. I work an alpaca farm, the animals blinking their adorable cartoon eyes as I lug photovoltaic panels up the ladder. At the end of the day the farmer thanks my coworkers and me by passing out cold PBRs. We get to talking. He and his wife shear, spin, and dye the alpaca yarn, he tells me, which they sell to local shops. I hold up my hand, show him the band, and mention the yarn shop on Main Street. You might have seen this coming, but it blindsides me: By chance, I’ve been sent to work on the very farm that sheared and spun and dyed the wool that became the skein of yarn that Liz and I have taken with us around our star. The alpaca who grew our rings could very well be that one right there, the farmer says. The coincidence seems fantastical, dreamlike. Everything tilts. How did I hop freight trains to Venice Beach, of all places on the long West Coast? How did my parents’ lives so improbably entangle? How did I just so happen to be enrolled in the same elementary school as Will, one of my oldest, dearest friends? How did we manage to evade the diseases, the accidents, the countless dangers to make it this far? The coincidences woven into our years seem utterly miraculous. But, then again, what if they are simply the stuff of life, made ordinary because of our star? In the scale of the universe, after all, we live in the same small room in the same small house in the same small town. All of us—every person, every animal, every taco, every lake—are as close as family can be.
Liz and I travel around our star again and again and again. We experience joy. We experience love. We experience pain. We are doing life. During our ninth lap together as husband and wife, Liz is teaching high school choreography, and I am teaching fourth grade, and a total solar eclipse is about to cut a path of totality from Texas to the Northeast. I obsess, learning all I can about stars to share with my students. I tell them that each year approximately seven stars are born in our galaxy, and that every two years a star dies, and that nothing in the universe is more powerful than a supernova—
“Mr. Fuller?”
A student interrupts, one of my favorites (fierce love of basketball, capybaras, and Ariana Grande, and also a standing weekly appointment with the school social worker). I have come to recognize the look on her face that means she needs attention, and she has that look right now.
I crouch by her chair. “Everything OK?”
She has a simple question: “Do all stars die?”
I nod.
She has a not-simple question: “Then what’s going to happen to the plants and animals?” She bursts into tears as she asks it.
I don’t know what to say. If our star can die, then so too can everyone and everything we know. The more we travel around our star, the deeper we fall into that most-certain future we know awaits our mothers, our lovers, our children, ourselves. When my student asks what will happen to the plants and animals, she is saying, What will happen to us, Mr. Fuller? What will happen to me? And although I am her teacher, and although I have traveled an impossible forty-one laps around our star, I do not have all the answers, not even close. All I can tell her is that she is safe here in our school, and that she can take a break in our classroom library if she’d like, and that in fifteen short minutes it will be time for recess.
But what will happen?
In five billion years, after our star finishes converting its remaining hydrogen into helium, its fuel light will chime on. Its nuclear fusion engine will sputter. Its gravity will increase, causing all that helium to contract, which will be exactly like aiming a bottle of lighter fluid at a campfire and squeezing with both hands: Watch out. Our star will swell, engulfing Mercury and Venus and swallowing us in its corona. Our plants and animals will disassemble into their elemental parts. Once the final whiffs of our star have burned off, gravity will enjoy its ultimate victory, crushing what’s left into a small, dead orb of oxygen and carbon that will continue, for billions of years, to give off heat and radiation, pulsating like a beacon—beep—as if to announce—beep—to any future explorers—beep—that something very special once happened here.
Once upon a time, a woman bounded into a taco spot in Venice Beach.
—beep—
Once upon a time, an alpaca munched the sweetest mouthful of clover.
—beep—
Once upon a time, a family jumped off a dock.
—beep—
Once upon a time, a westbound freight train slowed just long enough for—
—beep—
Once upon a time, a canoe paddle cut through the starry black silk of—
—beep—
—beep—
—beep—
