Only With You

07 | black hole

07 | BLACK HOLE

a region of space having a gravitational field so intense that no matter or radiation can escape.

☆

WHEN I WAS A KID, Dad and I used to go out into the backyard and see how many stars we could spot through the city's light pollution. Our neighbourhood was quiet and dim, so sometimes when it was really clear, we could even find Mars.

The tradition dampened as I got older. Kids grow up and find "better things" to do than hang out with their parents, and it didn't take long after twelve for me to start chasing boys with Luna. But I remember the last time Dad and I stood in the backyard together; I was eleven, the age childlike dreams become eclipsed by questions like What is time? What is life? Why am I here?

Cool, damp spring air had surrounded me, and there wasn't a single cloud in the sky. Dad had a beer in his hand. He's always been the type of person who can just have one. Of course, I hadn't discovered booze. Not yet.

"Someone in class told me that aliens aren't real," I told him.

Dad squinted at the moonlight beneath the rim of his baseball hat as if it were as bright as the sun. "Well, I don't believe that, do you? If every star is a sun just like ours, don't you think it's likely there would be other planets like ours?"

"That's what I told her!" I exclaimed. Of course I was quoting what he'd said to me so many times. To me, Dad was the smartest person in the world.

"But you know," Dad went on, "just because we can see a star in the night sky, that doesn't necessarily mean it's still there."

"What do you mean?"

"Well nothing travels faster than the speed of light, yet it still takes eight minutes and twenty seconds for the Sun to reach Earth. Our next closest star is Proxima Centauri, and it takes four years to reach us."

"Four years?" I gasped.

"Yep. And every other star we see is even farther, some of them millions and millions of lightyears away, so that means they could already be long dead by the time we decide to map them as a constellation."

My chest sank. All the other worlds I liked to dream about suddenly vanished. "Oh, but that's sad."

"I don't think it's sad. It just means it's possible, in at least one way, to look into the past."

"So it's like time travel?" I said, clinging to hope that the planets I envisioned were still alive.

He laughed and sipped his beer. "No, not quite like that. Well, maybe a little."

I laughed with him, but the smile slowly melted off my face. Sure, it was fun to dream about other planets, but a lot of the time when I looked up at the stars, I also wondered if my mother was looking up at them too, here on Earth. Not Donna—Donna was inside watching Real Housewives. I was thinking about Trudy.

Dad had told me about my birth mother, but I'd only ever seen one picture of her from when she was eighteen. She'd worn a nice white dress and smiled at the camera with her caramel hair straight and silky like mine, so it was easy to fabricate images of what kind of person she was based off that. I imagined she was just like me, fascinated with the stars. I imagined we had so much in common, and we'd get along great if we knew each other.

I had no idea the parts of Trudy that really existed within me until I discovered booze and partying a few years later.

And I didn't know that night would be one of the last nights things between Dad and I would ever feel normal.