The Lonely Planet

A lonely planet dances in its trail around the sun, its only companion a gray moon dragging along beside it. The other planets have many moons accompanying them – the little orbs seem to flood around them. Well, apart from those two planets, Mercury and Venus, but they've got enough in themselves and the sunrays.

"If only I were Jupiter," the lonely planet thinks, "with a mass and gravitation larger than all the combined planets, and still so beautiful and light, consisting only of swirling gasses and winds. Or if I cannot be a Jupiter, let me be one of its moons."

While the little planet dreamt of the other planets and tried to move ever closer to them, always failing due to a relentless pull towards their bright middle, it never noticed the life on its surface. It admired Jupiters gasses, Mercury's extreme temperatures, Saturns elegant rings, Neptune's density and Uranus' cool core, while it completely overlooked those weird creatures of connected carbon strings with attached hydrogens that started waddling around on top of it. It did not see the oceans or tectonic plates, the atmosphere or the varying climates.

The lonely planet saw nothing and felt vacuum creep into it, leaving a touch of emptiness. Even the moon could not make it feel better and the planet started to suffer the pressure of the world. In a gush of moodswing it erupted into volcanoes to hide behind a black cloud and freeze its emotions into solid matter.

When the cloud slid aside and allowed the planet to see the sun's light there was nothing but ice. It looked almost like Neptune and Uranus, but the little planet didn't dare call on them. It knew its secrets, knew what they would think, knew that beneath all the ice were floods of oxygen bound to hydrogen in liquid phase. Oh, liquid phase!

The lonely planet could never go far enough down, could never touch the absolute zero, and felt too hot to bear the whole of the world.

Some days the lonely planet only wished that the sun would hurry up and explode already. When all the planets united in a black hole, their unique properties destroyed, there'd be nothing keeping them apart anymore.

Maybe then the lonely planet would fit in.