Edwin L. Shuman Award for Creative Nonfiction Essay
Binary star systems die fantastic deaths. Most planetary nebulae hold, as their nuclei, a binary star system that has shared so much energy it busts outwards, throwing gases into space, becoming some of the most beautiful interstellar bodies. Some binary star systems are bigger, they are closer, they burn hotter. One star sends the other more gas and they explode with more force. When a binary system dies, it can explode into a supernova.
If you have seen a marriage die you will know they can end in many ways. Some of them fizzle out, slowly, shrinking until they are white dwarfs. Some of them end with one star circling the other so fast and so unsteadily it spins completely away, flying into an unknown part of the galaxy. Sometimes the smaller star will be completely consumed by the larger star. Sometimes they will both explode, a brilliant supernova in a black sky.
A binary star system is in an impermanent state. The stars cannot circle each other forever. Vultures cannot stay in the air forever.
These are laws of physics that make sense to me. And so it made sense, for a while, or at least in the dim orange light from the Volvo’s dashboard, that these laws might extend to humans whose lives have come to circle each other. That try as we might to keep ourselves in the air, to continue in our spirals around each other, there is always a force to pull our dances, finally, resolutely, to an ending.