The Sun Is Also a Star

by Nicola Yoon

CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

He’s a man’s man, meaning he’s an asshole a lot of the time. Most of the time. All of the time.

NATASHA IS NOT AT ALL correct about Irene. Irene loves her job. More than loves it—needs it. It’s almost the sole human contact she has. It’s the only thing keeping her total and desperate loneliness at bay. Every interaction with these applicants saves her life just a little.

But before that, before he becomes a politician and marries well, before he changes his name to Charles Bay, before he betrays his good wife and constituents at every turn, before too much money and success and much too much of getting everything that he wants, he will do a good and selfless thing for his brother. It will be the last good and selfless thing that he ever does.

“You listened to Bob Marley, and a bartender got you some pot, and someone told you what irie means, and you think you know something. You saw a tiki bar and a beach and your hotel room. That is not a country. That is a resort.”

And so when you hear the word, you hear the original spiritual meaning. Everything is all right between you and your god, and therefore between you and the world. To be irie is to be in a high and content spiritual place. In the word, you hear the invention of religion itself.

Words shouldn’t be allowed to change meanings. Who decides that the meaning has changed, and when? Is there an in-between time when the word means both things? Or a time when the word doesn’t mean anything at all?

EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON. This is a thing people say. My mom says it a lot.

Irene makes a plan. Today will be the last day of her life. The truth is, she’s been thinking about killing herself on and off for years. In Cobain’s lyrics she finally finds the words. She writes a suicide note addressed to no one: “Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.”

He smelled different, though, like American soap and American clothes and American food. Natasha didn’t mind. She was so happy to see him. She could get used to anything.

We all get out of the train, somewhere between relieved and angry. Everyone’s got someplace to be. Finding God is not on the schedule.

When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it’s gone, it’s like it was never there at all.

It’s been two years, but the grieving has not left him, shows no signs of leaving until it’s taken everything from him. It has cost him his marriage, his smile, his ability to eat enough, sleep enough, and feel enough. It has cost him his ability to be sober. Which is why he almost ran over Natasha just now.

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.

Besides the fact that I’m being deported today, I am really not a girl to fall in love with. For one thing, I don’t like temporary, nonprovable things, and romantic love is both temporary and nonprovable.

“All dictators think they’re benevolent. Even the ones holding machetes.”

We keep walking and not talking until we get to a giant concrete and glass monstrosity of a building. It amazes me that people spend their entire days inside places like this doing things they don’t love for people they don’t like.

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.

We walk down the hair dye aisle. All the boxes feature broadly smiling women with the most perfectly colored and styled hair. It’s not hair dye being sold in these bottles, it’s happiness.

“You’re not your dad,” I say, but he doesn’t believe me. I understand his fear. Who are we if not a product of our parents and their histories?

“IT’S HARD TO LOVE SOMEONE who doesn’t love you back,” I tell him. He opens his mouth and then closes it again. He wants to tell me that of course my father loves me. All parents love their children, he wants to say. But that’s not true. Nothing is ever universal. Most parents love their children. It’s true that my mother loves me. Here’s another thing that’s also true: I am my father’s greatest regret.

Now when these boys come in here with these girls who don’t look like their ommas, I get angry. This country try to take everything from you. Your language, your food, your children. Learn how to use chopsticks. This country can’t have everything.

We’re kindling amid lightning strikes. A lit match and dry wood. Fire Danger signs and a forest waiting to be burned.

“Sure, but why not more poems about the sun? The sun is also a star, and it’s our most important one. That alone should be worth a poem or two.”

It’s one of the things I like most about New York City. It deflects any attempts you make to lie to yourself.

This room is my church, and standing on this platform is my pillar. Touching this rock is the closest I ever come to believing in God.

My father had been dreaming his life away for years. He lived in those plays instead of the real world. He still does. My mother didn’t have time for dreaming anymore.

Growing up and seeing your parents’ flaws is like losing your religion. I don’t believe in God anymore. I don’t believe in my father either.

I’m so close. I’m at the edge of knowing him. We’re at the edge of knowing each other.

My father is shaped by the memory of things I will never know.

Even now, the memory of that first day still crops up at unexpected times. Dae Hyun wishes he could forget it. He’d imagined that coming to America would wipe it clean. But the memory always comes back. Those crabs never gave up. They fought until they died. They would’ve done anything to escape.

I can’t hear what they’re saying, but their gestures say it all. She’s outraged at him. He’s exasperated with her. They’re definitely not at the beginning of their relationship. They both look too weary for that. You can see their long history just in the way they lean toward each other.

Watching them makes me unreasonably happy. I guess the cliché is true. People in love want everyone else to be in love. I hope their relationship lasts forever.

“Do you think it’s funny that both of our favorite memories are about the people we like the least now?” I ask. “Maybe that’s why we dislike them,” she says. “The distance between who they were and who they are is so wide, we have no hope of getting them back.”

You can get lost in you own mind, like you gone to another country. All you thoughts in another language and you can’t read the signs even though they everywhere all around you.

He rubs again at the bandage above his eye and doesn’t look over at the desk. He’s tired, but not the kind of tired that sleeping can fix.

He really is a keeper. He’s just not mine to keep.

I think back to when we were on the roof earlier. I imagined the city as it was being built. Now I project it out into an apocalyptic future. The lights dim and the glass falls away, leaving just the metal skeletons of buildings. Eventually those rust and crumble. The streets are uprooted, green with wild plants, overrun with wild animals. The city is beautiful and ruined.

For his part, Daniel finishes high school but declines Yale. He moves out of his parents’ house, works two jobs, and attends Hunter College part-time. He majors in English and writes small, sad poems. And even the ones that are not about her are still about her. It’s not that Daniel wants to let Natasha go. He holds on for as long as he can. But he hears the strain in her voice across the distance. In her new accent, he hears the cadence of her slipping away from him.

He said that love and dark matter were the same—the only thing that kept the universe from flying apart. Her heart speeds up every time she thinks of it. Then she smiles in the darkness and puts the memory up on a shelf in the place for old, sentimental, impossible things.