Freewrite, On Endings [Fate of the Sun]

Faces turned to the sky, incomprehensible, they take in the warmth and yellow light of the sun that feeds and nourishes. They work with it at their backs and in the highlands where day and night play games, toy with one another, not battle it out per se, but become unstable and unbalanced, in these places sadness descends when the sun retreats in hiding.

They say in 5 billion years, the sun will turn, it will diminish in the way a runner has diminished glycogen stores, burned through fuel, . They say it will change the way it burns its fuel as the source of its light and fire, its nuclear fusion, because it will have less and less of it.

They say it is the way of things. The hydrogen will dissipate, the sun will not suffer because suffering seems a uniquely human quality, regardless of the words we use to describe the universe and its processes at large. It will transition into the red giant phase of it life, just before it dies.

It cannot be said if the sun will become a black hole, if its matter will collapse into itself, wrap itself in a tiny sphere of immense density, creating a gravitational pull that sucks things into it, a pull we cannot escape if we stray too close.

Before this hypothetical, the sun will become swollen and distended, a ripe piece of fruit to burst, bleeding its sticky juice into the galaxy and wash everything, the planets and moons and asteroid belts and comets, to bath everything in this atmosphere that has expanded into the space around it.

The core of the sun will remain the same, the corporal body that watches as its aura, trite, its prosthetic self extends beyond the body in the form of gas to drag and the pull of the sun inescapable, the drifting of the moon, the descent into the sun. We've been waiting all this time to feel so sure of anything.

And our fate, this place called Earth if it were to be called anything at all, Gaia and all her other names used in all the other cultures, and she is mostly a she, a body that gives life with the sky stretching out over her body is mostly always embodied as male and one has to wonder what the myths would be like if we were a hermaphroditic species rather than being engendered most specifically as male and female, with specific chemicals and hormones, perhaps our fate on this sister is not quite different from her origin.

According to theories, two siblings collided, The one sibling was this Earth and the other was a sister, like Earth, slightly smaller. The impact was violent, as anyone could imagine who has survived sibling rivalry. Earth was battered, both faces forever changed. That was some 4.5 million years ago.

Some can let it go, Moon is still trying to spiral away to drift into the sun, Earth tries to tug her closer. They pull at each others'’ hair.

Earth is slowing, she can'’t run as fast and every year she pushes moon away even as she wishes it closer.

They say moon will end as crushed, her fragile body will be pulverized from the tearing between the sun and the Earth, or perhaps in a collision with some unforeseen body that is traveling, in our past, to its destiny in the past, present and future. The Moon will be as fragments that Earth wears as a belt, a fashionable accessory to quicken her stilled heart.

This is the way it will happen, according to the models, firs the imitation and then the creation, new and exciting itself, the boundary will no longer be where it is but where it appears to be. A photosphere will bath us and pull at us. There is a push in return, the giant will come and push Moon back to her sister. Moon will be ripped apart by mere proximity, she was always the weaker one.

The belt worn proudly will be a demise, fragments of a sister will be loosed and puncture the skin and silence will be the tumultuous convergence of the two. Finally.

Red giant to white dwarf, fading to black, a whimper or a bang?

Iron Iron, the presence is everything

A glance, a blow

bodies in motion stay in motion