DEAR MR. PETERSON,
One of the very first things we learned in my astronomy class was that it takes 365 days for the Earth to complete a single orbit around the sun. For 4.54 billion years, the Earth has done this. It has never stopped, never asked for a break, never died out. It just keeps circling and circling and circling the sun until it ends up back where it began. Happy freaking New Year.
I knew this before I took that course my senior year, of course. But I don't think I fully measured just how much a year could change things. At this point in my life, a year ago I believed that Sebastian Grey was my greatest enemy. And then suddenly, with no gravitational shift and no lunar eclipse to warn me, he became my greatest love. And then some.
I think about it sometimes. What would happen if the Earth just...stopped. If it became fed up with the repetition and gave up trying to complete it's orbit. The long answer is that due to the loss of the centripetal force, the Earth would fall directly into the Sun, but not until a month later. We'd have to sit and watch as the world got hotter, sit and watch as the world went up in flames right in front of us, with nothing we could do about it.
The short answer is that the world would burn.
There's no metaphor that I'm here to spell out for you here, sir. I'm not here to tell you that I am the moon and he was the sun and we were doomed from the start. I don't have the energy to turn this into something beautiful. Because it's not. It wasn't. It was fiery and painful and not beautiful.
I don't have any metaphors. None, other than the ones you've come up with yourself.
The truth is, I'm all out of metaphors. I am no longer orbiting. I am slowly falling,
falling,
falling.