The Sun Is Also a Star

by Nicola Yoon

To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.

People spend their whole lives looking for love. Poems and songs and entire novels are written about it. But how can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?

And another thing: all your future histories can be destroyed in a single moment.

It seems like such a long time ago when I thought the world of him. He was some exotic planet and I was his favorite satellite. But he’s no planet, just the final fading light of an already dead star. And I’m not a satellite. I’m space junk, hurtling as far as I can away from him.

As our eyes meet, I get a kind of déjà vu, but instead of feeling like I’m repeating something in the past, it feels like I’m experiencing something that will happen in my future. I see us in old age. I can’t see our faces; I don’t know where or even when we are. But I have a strange and happy feeling that I can’t quite describe. It’s like knowing all the words to a song but still finding them beautiful and surprising.

There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will.

“I don’t believe in love.” “It’s not a religion,” he says. “It exists whether you believe in it or not.”

I wonder if she realizes how passionate she is about not being passionate.

And love is not love if it’s not requited, right?

If people who were actually born here had to prove they were worthy enough to live in America, this would be a much less populated country.

“Hope” is the thing with feathers. I understand concretely what that means now. Something inside my chest wants to fly out, wants to sing and laugh and dance with relief.

Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself.

Touching him is order and chaos, like being assembled and disassembled at the same time.

I could stay here forever interrupting our talking with kissing, interrupting our kissing with talking.

I know for sure that I will always compare every city skyline to New York’s. Just as I will always compare every boy to Daniel.

I never before thought that not caring could be a revolutionary act.

Because everything looks like chaos up close. Daniel thinks it’s a matter of scale. If you pull back far enough and wait for long enough, then order emerges. Maybe their universe is just taking longer to form.