Somewhere far away, in a galaxy full of stars with names unknown to Earth-beings, there’s a lonely a ship, a bit ragged but well-lived in, called Silver Starlight. Behind the bulletproof glass windows, only an arm-length away from the control room there’s a young man standing, looking out to the million constellations dotted on the picturesque canvas of universe.

“Can’t sleep, Captain?”

Still deep in his own thoughts, Sungjin’s head snaps back at the sounds of his commander’s approaching steps and sighs resigned as he answers.

“Not really,” he shakes his head massaging his aching temple. He should be used to travelling by light speed by now but somehow a migraine always finds its way back to him. Or maybe he’s just missing that herbal tea you made for him from leaves that only grow on that flat land of Earth.

As if he was able to read his mind, Brian speaks again:

“Don’t worry. You will find her,” he prompts patting Sungjin on the shoulder but the encouraging words don’t ease the bitterness in the captain’s heart. His fingers mindlessly play with the necklace hidden by his collar…

Yeah, you may meet again… but when? He has been looking for you for what feels like eternity. Why can’t he find you again? Why did destiny tear you apart leaving you both longing for the other so sweetly? Because yes, he knows you think of him just as much as he does of you. He feels this connection between you tugging at his heart and it’s driving him crazy: that you are out there waiting for him but he can’t hold you, can’t whisper sweet little nothings into your ear. Yet he can’t fall asleep to put his thoughts to rest, oh no, you won’t let him easily because he sees you everywhere and he’s missing you dearly from the moment you parted ways. You are like lost stars colliding in the vastness of universe that become merely specks of stardust and moonlight.

You met once and it almost feels like a dream, like it didn’t really happen. Sungjin and his crew were on a bounty when out of nowhere the ship’s engine broke down and they had to perform an emergency landing on a planet they knew nothing about. There were so many variables and factors but the two of you met, so Sungjin is sure it wasn’t coincidence. It couldn’t be. It was written it the stars for you to meet… and then to lose each other again.

“It’s okay,” you said, voice honey and sugar but the goodbye pained his heart.

You were the one who insisted that he should take the kids first and then come back for the rest of you before the ground beneath your feet shallows you up in whole. It was what you asked for in exchange of your help and hospitality when they landed their spacecraft with the breakdown engines on your farm’s backyard. From your reaction, Sungjin and his crew quickly gathered that none of you had ever seen anything like this. The thought of existence outside of your own little planet was unheard of.

“Our scientists believed in life somewhere beyond the borders known to us but then the meteor impact happened and nobody cared anymore,” you told him beside a fire lighted in the middle of nowhere when he asked about it. He was eager to know about you and your kind because he has never seen this place on the map of universe and you were happy to explain everything to him. You would have done anything if it meant, he would help your little community leave this place before everything dies. “The Earth, our planet moved closer to the Sun which caused a lot of troubles. The temperature got hotter drastically, the desertification process quickened, icebergs melt, the sea levels rose and we don’t have much time left.”

You shrugged like it didn’t even matter to you. Like you had already accepted your fate and didn’t even try to change it. The life you had known once no longer existed yet you didn’t give up. That’s why you still had that farm you called yours and which you cultivated with a few people who joined you for shelter. Your community grew until around thirty people lived and worked together to make the most out of the rest of your days on this Earth. Sungjin and his men looked around in awe, seeing the long forgotten technology you had and tasted the simple but delicious food you shared with them.

It had been a while since they were welcomed so earnestly in a foreign culture. Most planets’ inhabitants were quite suspicious and not without any reason. Space pirates with their worn clothes and weapon belt were bad news everywhere. However, you didn’t seem to know of them or simply didn’t care about their job. About how they steal and kill if they were paid for it. Or that they were wanted by authorities in different galaxies beyond the Milky Way. You all welcomed them with open arms and trusting smiles. For all you knew, they could have killed you and took your every belonging but Sungjin’s crew wasn’t made out of monsters. They weren’t heartless or ungrateful. The Captain even liked to call himself a businessman so he offered you a deal.

“If you help us fix our broken engine and let us stay here in the meantime, we can take a few of you to the neighbourhood galaxy so they can ask for a rescue team and come back for the others,” he offered and who could have said no to that? It was your best option even if it meant, you could only send the third of the camp first and the rest had to wait for another ship to save them from this hell.

The ship couldn’t take more than ten extra people in safety. Or even if it did, there wouldn’t have been supplies for everyone so you had to choose. Children were the first, everybody agreed and a few teenagers and a pregnant woman joined them. There wasn’t much dispute about it even though everybody knew that nothing guaranteed they would be still alive when a rescue team returns.

“Aren’t you afraid?” Sungjin asked you on another hot night standing on the porch of the rundown house with a cup of water in your hands looking up at the bright night sky. The moon being closer than ever was so huge it almost felt like collapsing onto you.

“Of dying?” you mused out loud and hummed while thinking. After seeing so many deaths around you and all the disease that broke out after the floods started, your own mortality didn’t scare you anymore. Waiting for death helplessly did. “No. It’s inevitable. It would be useless to be scared of something that will happen either way. When I go, I just want to be able to say that I did everything I could and I lived the best way I could.”

It’s such a rare approach, the Captain thought, A lot more people were afraid of death itself than the insignificance of their lives. Sungjin considered himself one of those who lived for the day without thinking of the long-time consequences of his actions so he respected you for looking at the bigger picture instead of survival instincts. There was something admirable about you staying so strong even under such cruel circumstances. It would have been a lie to say he wasn’t surprised. He didn’t expect this from a girl. He had been travelling around the universe yet he hadn’t met anybody like you. Somebody who could smile so sincerely at him after all the hardships, but being so smart and kind at the meantime. Every conversation he learnt something new. Not just about your beloved Earth and what it was like before the apocalypse started but about you too. He quickly became enamoured by your little things. The way you tucked your hair behind your ear whenever you were embarrassed or how you never hid your mouth when you laughed. You were so genuine and honest, a light in the darkness and he wondered how the cosmos could want you dead? Such a bright phenomenon should live.

“What about you?” you tore the canvas of silence into pieces with your lovely voice and Sungjin’s head turned towards you immediately.

“Huh?”

“Are you afraid of death? That’s why you carry those with you? Is the outer space that dangerous?” you pried curiously pointing at the gun attached to his hip. You hadn’t pointed it out before but now he realized you knew all along, you weren’t stupid.

“For some of us, yes, it’s dangerous. But I’m good at protecting myself. Though, it’s more for an idea rather than out of fear,” he answered pouring emotions he never called names into words.

“An idea?” you furrowed your brows not quite understanding the concept of it.

“Yes, like you know like you and these other people are working hard to stay alive, it’s the same for us… we just… sometimes we need to fight for that. The crew is like a family. We protect each other and what’s important for us.”

You nodded like you understood and he appreciated the sentiment. He didn’t take his eyes off of you as your gaze shifted back to the stars.

“How does it feel like to look around up there? Do you ever get lonely?”

Damn, why you always had to ask the questions that hit home? Sungjin chuckled. It was like you have already known him so well. Sure, in the middle of never-ending and vast outer space everybody got lonely from time to time. Even if you had people by your side, looking out to the stars left and right, the universe feels so enormous and you feel so tiny and alone.

“Yeah. Sometimes,” he admitted shyly, merely a whisper above the sounds of the night but you didn’t mock him for his childlike insecurity.

“That’s what I’m afraid of. That when I leave this place, the Earth I call my home no matter how messed up it is, I’m afraid of being left alone in an unknown place among strangers,” you mumbled so lost and so vulnerable, Sungjin’s heart ached.

He didn’t know why but felt the urge to comfort you, to hold your hand and tell you that everything would be alright. He wanted to promise that you won’t be alone but he stopped himself on time. It was such an impulse and reckless thought. With the kind of life he led, he could never promise anything like certainty to you so he just muttered something like “You shouldn’t be afraid.”

The Silver Starlight and its crew were on the Earth for only a week and as soon as the engines started working, they took off. They overstayed their welcome, the commander said apologetically but still it felt like they bid goodbye too soon. When it was time to leave, you ran up to Sungjin one last time.

“I… I know it’s stupid and probably just some Earth-being habit as you call it but… I wanted to give you something because I’m grateful that you are helping my people. And to remember us… and me,” you were rambling which he found cute and then you pulled off a necklace with a wing-shaped pendant. When you wanted to hang it around his neck, he protested right away.

“I’m not worthy of that,” he shook his head that made you giggle.

“I don’t know how gifts work in your galaxy but here there’s nothing like ‘not worthy’, please take it,” you urge him with a pleading look until he gives up and lets you put your accessory on him.

“I don’t have anything to give you,” he whispered but you didn’t care, you just smiled wide.

“It’s okay… Give me something next time we meet,” you said light-heartedly with the careless promise of meeting again and then stepped back so the spacecraft could begin its launching.

That was the last time he saw you, through the glass window, with your messy hair in the wind stirred up by the engines and your huge, brown eyes following the metal bird until it disappeared among the stars.

It’s been a long time because his ship might be one of the fastest but safe space travel still needed time. Also, the closest authorized organisations didn’t think that a dying planet with life on it was worth of saving, especially if they had nothing to offer. That’s why Sungjin decided to go back himself. He offered his crew a way out, he told them they didn’t need to come with him for an impossible mission for some humans who they barely met but none of them protested, none of them complained, not even when they were running out of supplies because the search was pointless. They couldn’t find you.

It should have been easy. A quick in and out. He noted every coordinate on the way back from your Earth but despite following each instruction, your galaxy seems empty as if a black hole swallowed up it whole, like the planet became one with the Sun. He has seen a lot of things before, being an excellent navigator, but he has never experienced anything like this.

How can a Solar System exist that is not in any of the records? How many light years away can you be? he wondered and wished you could answer. You surely would have something wise to say to make him feel at ease. However, without you, he could only hope the stars will shine bright showing him a map leading to you.

Your mother used to tell you that if you can’t sleep, you’re awake in someone’s dream.

She was a wise a woman, a very smart one in this man-ruled world so you never doubted her words. However, since the symptoms of your insomnia started, you think of this belief more and more. Whenever you look at up at the dark skyline, you’re searching for a face among the stars, a twinkling light promising he’s coming to get you, to save you from this dying planet.

Before he crashed into your life, almost literally, you were okay with the inevitable doom. You thought of it as a humans’ punishment for using the Earth selfishly. Even the scientists gave up after they found out that the Earth’s orbit has been spiralling around the Sun and in a few years, they will collide making an explosion that could destroy the rest of your galaxy. Of course, everybody would die before that could happen because of the heat scorching the planet. But if it’s a punishment, then Sungjin’s arrival was the salvation itself giving you the kind of hope you haven’t felt since your mother passed away.

Waiting is something you have always hated but now you have nothing better to do. Waiting for death or a rescue team, it’s all the same: you don’t know when they come. But the latter gives hope, maybe a false one but at least the people of the camp seem happier for the first time in a long while.

Days pass, getting shorter and shorter and you find yourself gazing at the burning stars every chance you get. You imagine one of them as the spaceship that’s coming to get you. Despite knowing it won’t be Sungjin’s anymore, it doesn’t stop your daydreaming about seeing him again when they set a foot an Earth once again. You cherish the memory of his smile and the glimmer in his eyes and you find yourself wishing for him to do the same. Maybe that’s why you find solace in the wishful thinking of him dreaming about you but you would never dare to admit it out loud.

“You are looking at the sky again,” a boy not much older than you remarks casually as he slumps down next to you onto the rotten bench. “You do that a lot lately.”

You flinch at his sudden appearance but can’t find it in you to be mad at him. Wonpil is a hard-working member of the community and a good listener, he has helped you a lot to deal with this many people around. He used to play a lot with the kids, so he probably misses them.

“Yeah,” you nod because it would be in vain to make up some lie about how peculiar the sky looks now that you are getting closer and closer to the Sun. You don’t like to lie anyway.

“Don’t worry. A rescue team should arrive soon,” he says and you only hum in acknowledgement. Though, time is one thing you don’t have the luxury to have much and everybody knows it. Even Sungjin warned you that time is counted differently up there so he couldn’t tell you how much time it would take for another team to arrive. It can be weeks or years, based on their technology you cannot even imagine.

“I know,” you sigh with hope tingling in your chest.

He promised and you believe him: they will send someone, you are sure of it. So you just sit there watching the stars every day, waiting.

It takes six more months of struggling to stay alive on a planet incapable of living when you start to forget, losing hope. You almost persuade yourself it was just a dream but all that proof doesn’t let you so it makes you sad instead. You miss a man you barely know and only see in your hazy dreams. Like the one you are having when you are rudely woken up.

“Wake up, sleepyhead!” somebody shakes your shoulder gently but you just grunt tiredly.

“Ah is it morning already?” you pry your eyes open slowly. There’s nothing but darkness around you and the endless possibilities scare you. You’re afraid of an attack or somebody dying because of the urgency in Wonpil’s voice but there’s a hint of smile on his face that makes you confused. “What…?”

“You will see,” he drags you out of the bed and leads the way. You are going out, you realize and still yawning, you freeze on spot when you catch a glimpse of the monument in the middle of the corn field close-by. The metal craft is as beautiful and elegant as you remember and the moonlight is dancing on its silver wings. Under the brighter than ever stars, a young man is walking down the ramp towards you with a secret smile playing on his ethereal features.

You take a step, then two and three until you run into his arms like a kid. He doesn’t disappear when you touch him and it feels like a real wake-up call.

“You came back,” you whisper still in awe, blinking at him wildly, not believing your eyes. He’s here, really here, not merely in a dream, dissolving into thin-air like a mirage.

“Of course. Sorry it took so long to find you,” he says as if it goes without saying and you know you will fall in love with him. You are not there yet, only edging on this sweet feeling with tentative touches and shy glances but eventually you will tip over and fall.

Right into the black hole. With him, happily.