The words fluttered through me like wings. Outside, the universe stretched vast and unknowable, waiting in its cold eternity. But here, inside the fragile orbit we had created, we had found our own gravity. Our own constellation. Our own vow, blazing brighter than any falling star.
We stepped out into the night, the air cool and trembling with anticipation. The sky above us was a vast canvas of velvet black, dotted with scattered diamonds, and then, like the heavens exhaling, the first streak tore across the horizon. A single thread of light. A promise.
Soon, the sky was alive. One after another, meteors flared and burned, brief and glorious, as if the universe itself had decided to rain fire just for us. Each one carved a fleeting path across the dark, igniting the silence with wonder. My breath caught; my hand found his. Together, we stood suspended, two small figures beneath a storm of falling stars, our hearts beating to the same rhythm as the cosmos.
I looked at him, my moonboy, my constant, and knew this was my choice. Not fate, not accident. Him. Just like I have always been his choice.
"I vow," I whispered into the night, into the fire and light above us, "for love, for respect, for the choice we make every single day. For a future where we keep choosing each other."
He turned to me, eyes glowing with tears that mirrored the brilliance overhead. Without a word, he pulled me close, and there, beneath the streaking heavens, we began to sway. No music but the rush of the night air, no floor but the earth beneath our feet. Just a dance stitched into the fabric of time itself.
"And I vow," he breathed, voice trembling but steady, "to be your gravity, the pull that never lets you drift too far. To be your North Star, constant and unwavering, guiding us back no matter how dark the night. I vow to orbit only you, to guard your heart like the rarest constellation, and to love you with a devotion as endless as the universe itself."
Stars fell, our laughter tangled with breath, and in that moment I knew: no matter how infinite the sky or fleeting the meteors, we had written our vow into the constellations. Ours was a love that would burn, not once, but again and again, as long as we kept choosing the dance.
Epilogue 1
I woke and turned, still half afraid that what I saw might vanish with the morning. A quiet body lay beside me, breaths steady, hair spilling like spilled ink across the pillow. For a moment Ijust watched, listening to the rhythm of another life so close to mine, feeling a disbelief that this was real—that after years of reaching, hoping, waiting, I wasn't waking up alone. How many nights had I woken from the same dream, reaching for warmth only to find nothing but silence, a hollow bed, a colder sky? Yet here, now, the silence was alive. It breathed beside me, threaded with warmth and pulse and presence. The boy who once lay on picnic blankets staring at galaxies, wishing for a place in the world, had finally won, not with fame or fortune, but with her.
Since I was a boy, lying on grass with my mother after sunset, watching the first shy stars prick the sky, I've known I belonged to the cosmos. Galaxies, asteroids, the sweep of infinity; they were my sanctuary. They were constant when nothing else was. When kids mocked me for skipping parties to study constellations. When I was called strange, too much, too different. When one girlfriend left because I laced every thought with astronomy, and another because the fire of my dominance in bed didn't match the quiet, easygoing way I lived outside of it. When my mother began to forget my name, her own face in the mirror, and I clung to the stars to remind myself that memory exists somewhere, even if only in light traveling through the void.
Through all of that, the universe was my only refuge. Until her.
Until my June. My Celestia. The constellation I never knew I was waiting for. She became my safety, my happiness, my galaxies and supernovas gathered into human form. I fell in love with her in days, as if the universe had been aligning us long before we knew.
She shifted slightly, opened her eyes just for a second, smiled, and drifted back to sleep and I melted. My Celestia has always felt like a dream come true. Letting her go was the hardest thingI've ever done. Every instinct in me screamed against it, but somewhere deep down, I knew I'd thank myself for the courage one day. I couldn't stay with her while wondering if her heart was doubting, so I let her walk away and she came back, that night after the meteor shower, I hugged her so tightly I thought I could keep her there forever. I made every wish I could, on falling stars and on my own breath, that she would never leave me again, that I would make her happy. I kept my eyes on the stars, trying to hold back the tears. I'm not usually a crier, but that was a moment too big for pride. Right then, I started planning our future.
For a while, we endured the distance. I went back and forth to see her, sometimes she came to me, and every goodbye was a tearing apart. I would go home after dropping her off and open the secret drawer where I kept her ring—a piece unlike any other. It was delicate and luxurious, forged in white gold, but what made it hers was the stone: a rare, silvery-gray fragment of lunar rock, polished until it shimmered like starlight trapped in crystal. It felt like I was holding a piece of the universe in my hand, saving it for the right moment, the moment she would say yes, and the heavens themselves would bear witness.
Eventually, I wanted her to move in. I couldn't leave my mom, even though she no longer knew who I was—I knew who she was, and that was enough. I couldn't abandon her, and Celestia understood that without me even needing to explain. She was the one who suggested moving first, easing the weight from my shoulders. For a while she stayed with her father, but then, after a few weeks, she brought her suitcases and her dreams into my home, a dance studio in the town, and with her came a light that never dimmed. Suddenly, it wasn't just a house anymore, it wasours.
Life since has been nothing short of extraordinary. There have been moments that burst open inside me like fireworks scattering across a midnight sky, the first time we whispered "I love you," voices shaky, almost afraid of the weight those words carried, yet certain enough to let them fall. The first night she sat with my mom when I couldn't bring myself to walk through the door, when grief and fear made me cowardly. June just went, quietly, without asking. I found her there in the dim light of my mother's room, her hand resting gently over my mom's frail one, her voice steady and soft, speaking as though they had shared a lifetime of secrets.
My mom, who so often drifts in and out of memory like a tide that won't stay, looked at her and smiled. Not the distant, polite smile she sometimes offers strangers, but the kind that belongs to recognition, even if no name or story came with it. It was as if June carried something familiar, something safe, in her very presence.
Those moments carved themselves into me, not loud or dramatic, but permanent—like constellations etched into the sky. Markers of love, devotion, and the quiet strength she carries, strength I lean on more than I ever thought I would.
But what I treasure most are not the grand occasions; they're the quiet, ordinary pieces of our days that make life feel like a love story written in the margins. The way she curls against me at night, fitting so perfectly into the hollow of my arms as though she was always meant to be there. The smell of her cooking mingling with the sweetness of my baking, filling the house with a kind of warmth that has nothing to do with ovens or stoves. Her laughter, bubbling up like sunlight, especially when I inevitably burn the toast and try to pass it off as "extra crispy." The way she leans in the doorway, teasing me while I'm knee-deep in the garden, pretending to be frustrated as I scold weeds like they're stubborn children.
It's in those small, fleeting things—when she walks into a room and my heart stumbles, as if falling in love with her is brand new all over again. When she tilts her head and gives me that soft, knowing smile that undoes me completely. When she giggles, a sound so pure it feels like the universe is whispering its secrets through her, and I silently beg time to never take that sound away.
Even in our fights, there is something rare. We give each other space, but it never lasts more than a few minutes before one of us reaches back across the silence. Words are spoken, voices soften, and somehow we always find our way back—not because it's easy, but because neither of us can stand to stay away.
She has made the mundane sacred, the ordinary miraculous. With her, every moment is a kind of forever.
Two years later, I knew it was time. I had carried her ring, the piece of moonlight I'd hidden away for so long, in my pocket and in my heart, waiting for the moment that would match the immensity of what she meant to me. So I took her north, not telling her why, only promising her something worth the journey.
We stood under a vast, endless sky, wrapped in silence, our breaths fogging in the frozen air. Hours passed in anticipation until, at last, the heavens opened. The Northern Lights unfurled across the horizon—green, violet, gold—ribbons of living fire weaving and swaying like the universe itself had risen to dance for her. She gasped, her hands pressed to her lips, and then she began laughing, twirling, jumping up and down like a child inawe of a miracle. I watched her—her joy more radiant than any sky and I knew this was it.
When she turned to tell me how beautiful it was, she found me on one knee, trembling not from the cold but from love too big for my chest. For a heartbeat she froze, her eyes wide, and then she collapsed to her knees before me, tears streaming down her cheeks. She sobbed so hard she could barely breathe, her whole body shaking, and then she screamedyes—not whispered, not murmured, but screamed it into the night so fiercely it felt like the aurora itself pulsed brighter, as if the universe had been waiting for her answer too.
I slipped the ring onto her finger, the moon's stone now hers forever, and she threw her arms around me. We clung to each other under that cosmic cathedral, our tears mingling with our laughter, our breaths clouding in the frozen air, our souls feeling infinite. For the first time, I believed that maybe love really was written in the stars—because I could see ours shining back at us.
The sound of her shifting beside me pulled me back to the present. The Northern Lights had long faded into memory, but the warmth of her body against mine was a miracle of its own. I turned to see her stirring in the morning light, her eyes half open, that familiar sleepy smile curving her lips.
"Morning, husband," she whispered, her voice still tangled with dreams.
"Morning, wifey," I murmured back, my chest tightening at the word.
