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A binary star system is a system of two stars which are gravitationally bound to each other, orbiting about the same epicenter, until they inevitably lose energy and, in their collision, release unimaginably large amounts of energy into the void.
Donghyun thinks, like binary stars, he and Dongmin were always destined to collide.
There’s nothing you can do to stop the spiral inward of two nebulous giants that have already taken hold of each other. It’s a natural, gentle thing — an orbit with the same angular velocity, around the same barycenter. Before you know it, it’s been a thousand years; for some, it could take hundreds of trillions of years before the two stars ever meet. But they will meet, as most things in the universe, eventually.
“Do we really have to talk about space?” Dongmin complains. He is occupied with his phone, scrolling some mundane thing with its blue glow flattening the shadows on his face. He doesn't look like he's listening, but Donghyun's not too worried about that.
There’s a whole universe there, Donghyun thinks, lit by the LCD screen of Dongmin’s 1080 × 2400 pixel phone, and in spite of himself, he laughs. There’s something in him that still quakes whenever Dongmin speaks, a tectonic sort of movement that shifts even the molten surfaces of stars.
His world was full of uncertainties and impossibilities, but the biggest one would always be Han Dongmin, in all his brilliance and skepticism. “Don’t tell me you’re a flat earther,” Donghyun replies, and if he meant there to be malice in his voice they both know he has failed.
Dongmin huffs, looking up from where he’s laid down on the couch. They’re both far too big to fit on such a small island; truth be told, sometimes Donghyun feels too big to fit anywhere at all, whatever he’s carrying inside him spilling out without care for the world. Scars and love and stardust. But then Dongmin came along, all long torso and lanky legs, taking up the space Donghyun was scared to fill.
And now Donghyun feels smaller than ever. A blip in the entirety of the cosmic universe. A floating astronaut in the face of two stellar giants, sucked in by a near-religious, inexplicable pull.
“I just mean…” Dongmin says, leaning his head back on the sofa armrest. His feet are conveniently kicked up on Donghyun’s lap, who, obviously, doesn’t say anything about it. “The universe is so vast and unknown. And all that we think we know, we don’t actually know.”
“That’s the case for most things in the world,” Donghyun says. “We’ll never know enough.”
Briefly, Donghyun muses about how that’s true for Dongmin as well. Sure, Donghyun knows the curve of his shoulders, the angle of his nose. The glint in his eyes when he’s come up with a snappy joke, the pink dusting on his freckles that look like the universe split itself into pieces and gifted a part to him.
But there are also things he’ll never know, and that’s the paradox of human curiosity. To ask and be met with more questions. Donghyun is cursed with the greed of man and the heart of a fool and he wants to learn Dongmin until he can trace the ridges of his palms and kiss the sweat off his back.
Dongmin shifts, his feet against the rough fabric of Donghyun’s shorts. Somewhere a million light years away from them a star explodes, but they wouldn’t even know it until everyone on earth is dead, a million years later. Donghyun feels it, though, a shudder in his bones.
“I don’t like thinking about it,” Dongmin supplies. “It’s quite scary to think about, that the world out there is endless and cold and all we’ll ever know about it is a theory from 1941 that came from a man who stole it from his wife and is most likely not true. It’s more productive if we just focus on things here.”
Donghyun laughs again. He can’t help it as much as the moon can’t help but orbit the earth. “You’re being cynical.”
And beyond that, Dongmin is wrong. Sometimes, the universe can feel warm too. Sometimes, the universe shrinks on itself and becomes the living room of an apartment that’s too big for one, as if mocking the action of Donghyun padding across the tiled floor and opening the door to someone who comes by so often he may as well just live here already. Sometimes it’s unbearably hot, a fire Donghyun can feel at his fingertips when Dongmin laughs and jokes that it’s almost as if the apartment was intended for someone else to stay there too. Or sometimes, this warmth is just the radiation of another’s legs, seeping through the cheap fabric of the shorts he got from the flea market downtown at a slightly haggled price.
Dongmin suddenly sits upright, the warmth retracting like the glow of a star. “Should I just move here?” He says, in that sort of ambiguous way that leaves enough room for him to be serious, and enough room for him to back out if things don’t go well. Like a cosmic void that detaches him from intention if he plays it well enough.
“You don’t mean that,” Donghyun replies. It’s the only way he knows how to meet Dongmin halfway: all spiraling movements, all push-and-pull. One day they really will collapse onto each other, and he’s not sure how he’ll react then.
Love is a cosmic impossibility, Donghyun thinks.
Humans have always tried to find meaning in what they saw. Eventually (as most things in the universe) they began to realise life was inherently meaningless — no grand illuminating saviour was going to descend down from the heavens to reach a hand out to the deserving and kind; they’d stay in heaven if it were really so nice.
Humans continued to find meaning anyway. They saw myths and goddesses in the imagined lines of nonexistent constellations, and wrote poems about the beauty of the inky night sky. Donghyun thinks he couldn’t be bothered to write a poem about the universe, but he might consider the beauty of the boy in front of him.
Dongmin gives him a smile that’s strangely bittersweet. The binary stars are a little closer to colliding. Donghyun tries to find meaning in that, too.
“You know, Donghyun-ah,” Dongmin says, a hesitation in his voice that is slippery and loose, “sometimes you look at me in a way. I can’t describe it.” He chuckles, his typical display of playing it cool. His flushed cheeks are the only sign of otherwise; that’s one of the things Donghyun does know. “Sometimes I think you might even like me or something.”
Donghyun often wonders how much science and fate can coexist alongside each other before it becomes self-contradictory. How can the influence of destiny shake the undeniable truth of the world; how can the world stand against the unstoppable force of destiny? Until what point does it become a matter of will? At what point should he stop fighting it?
Even a single speck of dust that is out of place could have caused a large enough ripple effect that would render all of evolution useless and humans’ trace to be wiped off the planet entirely. By that logic, love is a cosmic impossibility.
Yet even then Donghyun wants to shout with all his heart, You left a print on me and it feels measurable to when they first kissed the moon with the white of their boots. Their prints won't fade for another million years, and so will yours. What do I call this? What do I call this if not love?
“You’re doing it again,” Dongmin says, whispers. It's barely audible, but something about his voice is soft at the edges tonight. There is an indulgent smile dancing on his lips, reminiscient of the melting of icebergs and the heat of summer. There are more stars in space than there are specks of sand on earth, and all of that turns meaningless when Donghyun’s world only consists of one other person, the Big Bang and the birth of black holes and the combining of supermassive stars all in one human body. It seems utterly impossible; Donghyun knows it isn’t.
“What answer do you want?” Donghyun asks, and maybe then he understands why Dongmin is so cynical about space. Humans will naturally seek the answer they wish to find; the truth of how Donghyun feels is not so much a fact as it is a suggestion, should Dongmin wish it to be. It’ll never have to leave his mouth, because what Dongmin wants is what he will get.
Dongmin’s lips take on a wistful curve. “What do you think?”
Push and pull. Orbit around an orbit around an imaginary anchor. Donghyun never stood a chance. He shifts himself closer to Dongmin; the heat he is emitting is almost palpable enough to taste. “I think,” Donghyun says, and it feels like a colossal task to keep his voice steady, “there’s enough room in here for two.”
Bravery is a virtue not often seen these days in the infinite void of the cosmos. Dongmin bites on the apple red of his lips and tests the line of destiny and free will. “How much can you give me?”
“Anything.” Donghyun fails in his endeavour to keep his voice unshaken. He doesn’t want to hope for too much; when you look at an unyielding sky where not a star can be seen, hoping is all you learn to do. “Anything at all.”
He means it. The truth spills out of him like a gilded offering, like it's even worth anything at all, and briefly he wonders why he ever bothered to lock it up.
Dongmin’s eyes widen in the split second it takes for a supernova to light up the universe. Then he laughs, and Donghyun thinks the timbre of his voice could be a universe of its own.
Like binary stars, he and Dongmin were always destined to collide. At the very least, he thinks that can be considered fate.