Interplanetary: The Sun {1/9}

A whip and tangle. An eddy of gas and dust pirouetting through the dark. Spin faster and yet faster still. Gather tightly in, then fling your arms wide. Count them, one through eight — everyone made it, everyone's here. Now, exhale.

An outpost on Orion’s Spur. The centre holds, but what choice does it have? I didn't ask to be this; it's simply who I am. It's where I landed in that dance across the Expanse, with a lap full of fuel and a duty to burn.

It's what everyone thinks they want: To be the star, beautiful, the place where all eyes land. But no one thinks about the melancholy of the middle, the point around which all else pivots.

There is no stepping right, or left, or out. There is simply a need to keep the system alive, aloft, afloat. And the knowledge that the task requires the consumption of one's own self. Autosarcophagy by design.

So that is what I do — I blaze. I reach deeply within and mine fistfuls of my own being. Atoms. I eat them — ravenously, always so ravenously — and they fuse in my core. That’s when you see me, shattering your darkness and compelling your gaze. That's when you feel me, painting your skin as if a lover with a hungry tongue.

I devour myself slowly and surely and deliberately, second by second, day by day, year by year, all so that you might live. Laugh. Love. A protracted death for your short and precious life.

So drink me in. And for god’s sake don’t waste a drop. Sense me as I roar through your veins. Hear me thudding in your chest.

You bleed red, but it is I who keeps you alive.

Your heart is my gold.

Soundtrack: Gustav Holst, “The Planets”