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.

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

The case is the cover art for an album called Nevermind by the band Nirvana.

Nirvana’s lead singer was Kurt Cobain. His voice, the damage in it, the way it’s not at all perfect, the way you can feel everything he’s ever felt in it,

More than anything, she wishes she could take her gloves off and touch the keys and the wallets and the loose change. She wishes she could slide her fingertips along the surfaces, memorizing textures and letting the artifacts of other people’s lives seep into her.

DANIEL IS RIGHT ABOUT CHARLES. He’s an asshole through and through. Some people grow out of their lesser natures, but Charles will not. He will settle into it, the skin that was always going to be his.

Names are powerful things. They act as an identity marker and a kind of map, locating you in time and geography. More than that, they can be a compass.

So they would know where they were from. So they would know where they were going.

Don’t let you pride get the better of you, Tasha.

I even just started getting my application together for Brooklyn College.

The problem is that I’ve never had my heart broken, so I’m having a hard time.

People say these things to make sense of the world. Secretly, in their heart of hearts, almost everyone believes that there’s some meaning, some willfulness to life. Fairness. Basic decency. Good things happen to good people. Bad things only happen to bad people.

She writes a suicide note addressed to no one: “Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.”

And it is joy. There’s a pure kind of joy in the certainty of belief. The certainty that your life has purpose and meaning.

But how can you trust something that can end as suddenly as it begins?

I look away so she doesn’t see my own tears forming.

It has cost him his ability to be sober.

no one can put a price on losing everything. And another thing: all your future histories can be destroyed in a single moment.

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.

Area Boy Attempts to Use Science to Get the Girl

She slows down and looks over at me. “Do you really think asking me deep, philosophical questions is going to make us fall in love?” She puts air quotes (oh, how I dislike air quotes) around deep and philosophical and fall in love.

“Statistically speaking, a black woman living in the United States is most likely to die at the age of seventy-eight from heart disease.”

I know there’s no such thing as meant-to-be, and yet here I am wondering if maybe I’ve been wrong.

I close my open palm, which wants to touch him, and I walk on.

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.

She shivers a little and rubs her hands down her forearms. I can see the goose bumps on her skin, and now I’ve learned another thing about her: she gets cold easily. I take her jacket and help her into it. She slides one arm in and then the other, and then shrugs to adjust the shoulders. I help her with the collar.

“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?

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

“IT’S HARD TO LOVE SOMEONE who doesn’t love you back,”

“It’s not up to you to help other people fit you into a box,” she says.

Observable fact: He is pretty hot with his hair down. Observable fact: He’s pretty hot with his hair up too.

I don’t care what she says about love and chemicals. This will not fade away. This is more than chemistry. She pulls away, and her eyes are shimmering black stars looking into mine.

I CAN’T STOP. I DON’T want to stop. My body absolutely does not care what my brain thinks. I feel his kiss everywhere. The tips of my hair. The center of my belly. The backs of my knees. I want to pull him into me, and I want to melt into him.

HOLY…

…SHIT.

“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.”

I KISS HIM TO GET him to stop talking. If he keeps talking I will love him, and I don’t want to love him. I really don’t. As strategies go, it’s not my finest. Kissing is just another way of talking except without the words.

FATE HAS ALWAYS BEEN the realm of the gods, though even the gods are subject to it.

He drinks too much. On his way home, he rams his car into a parked police car. In his drunkenness he tells the police officer the whole history of our coming to America.

Maybe she was right. I’m just looking for someone to save me.

Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too.

That’s how I felt when we first got the deportation notice. It’s also how I felt when I figured out that Rob was cheating on me.

I grin at her, dying to know how her scientific brain is going to deal with this epic level of coincidence. “What are the odds?” She laughs at me. “Enjoying yourself, are you?”

“Is it gonna hurt if I kiss you?” I ask him.

She raises her head from my shoulder to look at me. “You really believe in God?” “I do.”

I think that’s God. God is the connection of the very best parts of us.”

“But you believe in something?” She frowns, uncertain. “I really don’t know. I guess I’m more interested in why people feel like they have to believe in God. Why can’t it just be science?

How did we go from eyes as a survival mechanism to the idea of love at first sight? Or the idea that eyes are the windows to the soul? Or to the cliché of lovers staring endlessly into each other’s eyes?

To see. To be seen.