Comet & Star: A Cosmic Fable about the Rhythms and Consolations of Friendship

People pass through our lives and change us, tilting our orbit with their own. Sometimes, if the common gravitational center is strong enough, they return, they stay. Sometimes they travel on. But they change us all the same.

The great consolation of the cosmic order is the constancy of its laws, indiscriminate across the immensity of space, unchanged since the beginning of time. That we can predict an eclipse centuries into the future with precision down to the second but not the outcome of an...