Blue Eyes: one

Witness: Was it a love story? That’s a good question. In the end they merged but who knows if that's love the way we like to pretend to define it. If there's no you anymore, who is then doing the loving? And even merging seems like too passive a term for what happened, too "my partner and I have merged our possessions," or like two corporations reaching a healthy agreement. That’s not quite what happened between them. God knows they had to wait, and for a long time, and I don’t know if it's possible to say that they both agreed on the whole thing. Who agrees to their own annihilation?

Have you ever seen a binary system with two stars, and one is feeding off of the other? It wasn't like that. In that situation the pull of one is stronger and it sucks the star dust off of its weaker partner. We’ve all seen that play out in human life, haven't we? They weren't like that. Maybe it would have been easier for all of us, for them, if they had been. One sacrifices, the other feeds off of it, benefits somehow. Easy. Like I said, we see it all the time. A familiar dynamic.

But have you heard of the binary systems that strengthen each star? They have just enough distance between them, are just taut enough apart, that the tension forces them to gain in power, and for the system itself to gain in power. Look it up. It’s almost too much to accept. It almost makes you need to look away. It’s almost perverse - it's a gull regurgitating her meal for her young. It's primal and beyond our comprehension. Imagine two glowing orbs of plasma pulsing in the black sky, each beat in their rhythm like the heart beating in your own chest. Each throb resonating just so, so that each star’s twin, it's lover, grows. It’s a feedback loop: each star is mother and child. How can it ever end? It’s non-linear, it's disturbing to our causal-focused minds, and it hurts to think of their beauty growing and glowing, so so connected, as one. Two as one. One system, two stars. Two lovers. One.

close binary stars