You were four point five billion years young the first time you were banished into the void. The decision had not been sudden; there had been years of family meetings as the sun aged, its crepuscular rays no longer reaching, and its gravitational hold no longer holding. But it remained the most glorious being within your proximity, and for a small moment of eternity, that seemed enough to keep hurts at bay. You understood that someday your family unit would break apart in a crashing, glorious disaster, and you’d be wrapped within the collateral damage. It had never occurred to you that your own ending could be so clean and easily decided.
Jupiter with their humungous ego was the first to celebrate your sentencing. They had always treated your admiration towards Saturn as if it were something abhorrent in nature. Saturn listened, their flimsy rings of dust speeding, the stones turning into billions of transparent crystal lattices. Once you had dreamed of approaching Saturn, of merging your own crust and sea into their denseness and becoming something beautifully new, but you’d have to eat Mars first and you really couldn’t do that—you liked Mars; it was sweet, albeit boring, mostly dry and relatable. Of all the planets, you were perhaps the most alike with your gravitational pulls and the micro-creatures crawling on your surfaces. You also owed Mars for the invasion of privacy; just a rotation ago, specks of your mutated growth had landed on its surface after thousands of tries. No matter how puny and microbial those pollutants were, they had been loud when they landed, and caused several unnatural eruptions, an embarrassment for you both. Maybe it was for that reason, Mars did not come to your rescue.
You tried to find support elsewhere. Uranus was a Jupiter-worshipping, cold-natured mass of gas, and Neptune strayed as far as possible from the family conflict as they could, often seen chasing after Pluto to come to family meetings. You were tired of their excuses—everyone knew Pluto was an unreliable piece of space gunk. And with Mercury being such a lapdog-loving-son-of-sun, you knew Venus was your last hope. Being the ultimate family shame; not only did it rotate in retrograde, it consistently burned scandalous clouds around its body. Despite everything, you were twins in size and composition and you treated Venus with nothing but amiability. Yet, Venus watched you plead, and burned extra bright, its outer veneer shaping into a sneer.
Then, there was the Sun, the greatest being in all the Universe, except it wasn’t. There were far bigger, and more brilliant beings out there, or so you had been told. As it came towards you, carrying its all too consuming flames to your proximity, all your pleas and anger turned into a single question; Why me? You had followed its every established rule from the very beginning and never strayed once; you were not Venus rebellious, not Jupiter arrogant, not Pluto lazy. Unlike dry and arid Mars, you contributed during family meetings, created cosmic jokes with the fates of your micro-organisms for their entertainment. You were not a blind follower like Uranus or Mercury. You were just you. Why weren’t you enough?
The sun was so close to you that for a scorching, aching moment, as it leaned into you, the need to crash and ignite became all consuming. It didn’t want you, didn’t want to carry remnants of you as a part of its existence. Instead, it gave a gentle nudge, which translated into a plummeting punch for your size and mass. The flaming force sent you freewheeling into the pitch black unknown.
It was cold. Without the usual gravitational pull, you no longer knew which direction to go. You were a mass of solid matter and water, adrift and alone. Soon, the micro-creatures within you began to die out. You could only watch as the sunlight suckers bled out of their colours, and the blues of the oceans became murky and still. Those that had not already been destroyed by the punch were dying on the scorching crumbles that now made up a third of your body. You, yourself, were dying, but not as fast as the minuscule pimplings that once walked on your skin and acted as the Creator. They ejected themselves into space in tiny capsules, ending in splatters so small you almost didn’t notice. Except, it grew really, really quiet.
There were no more rumbles or senseless attacks hard enough to prickle, no more marches made in your health which was really their health. You could no longer dial in to listen to their nonsense at times when you were bored out of your crust. You envied them. How wonderful it was to be finite; to exist and cease to be all in a blink, to never matter in the long scale of timeline in an ever-expanding universe.
You were only four point five billion years young but you already knew you were meant to exist on a longer run, if not as you entirely, then as pieces of yourself. More than once, as you slaved in your predestined circles around the sun, you wondered what it was like to be a supernova, to pull and be pulled so inevitably into a new being, to be hot plasma heated to incandescence. You searched within you to find the foreign pieces that once belonged to Theia. You recalled that explosion; the fervour and passion in its being as it launched into you, inviting you to ignite into new matter. You had been all about distant admiration and planetarium fun, but never brave enough to commit. Were you brave enough now?
You didn’t know the answer, but as you coasted across the black kaleidoscope, homeless moons and baby planets gathered around you, seeking warmth, shelter, and direction. You reached deep within you and gathered all the molten magma of bravery, charging, colliding, and burning.
Attempting at finite. Becoming a star.
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Annie ZH Sun is a Chinese writer who grew up in Malta. She graduated from the Msc Creative Writing programme at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has been published in Antae, Bag of Bones Press This Is Tense anthology, Band of Bards Dark Side of Purity zine, and is forthcoming in Pseudopod and Silk and Foxglove anthology. She is the winner of the Horror Competition in Edinburgh Writers Club.