“When his dear friend Michele Besso died, Einstein imparted his theory on death to Besso’s sister, in a letter of condolence. He writes, ‘Michele has left this strange world a little before me. This means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction made between past, present and future is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.’

In my search for quintessence—the meaning of existence through understanding what dark matter (and therefore the universe) is made up of—I find myself returning to this scrap of knowledge that Einstein imparted to a grieving woman and, perhaps, to his own grieving self. Is it possible that Einstein discovered true quintessence—the secret to eternal life that philosophers and alchemists have been searching for across the centuries? Perhaps the Elixir of Life isn’t a tonic at all, but the simple knowledge that time is elastic and, as such, what we would consider a life’s end—consciousness forever relegated to the past—is its beginning elsewhere.”

“Houston, we have SCIENTIFIC PROOF OF ETERNAL LIFE!”

Ben laughs. “Maybe. But I think he’s ultimately saying what we have to be okay with is not that we’re going to die, but that we don’t know what, exactly, or where or when we’ll be when these physical manifestations of ourselves time out. So we have to live the hell out of the atoms we are right now and be okay with letting the form they take go when the time comes. But…” He smiles. “Maybe my atoms will always find your atoms.”

I think of our kiss: I am lost without you. Quantum love.

“No object has a definite position except when colliding with something else,” I whisper.

He nods. “You’re my definite position in the universe.”

“We’re a funny pair,” I say. “You love gravity, and I’m always trying to escape it.”

“I’m so proud of you. I can’t wait to be standing outside, looking up, and knowing you’re somewhere above me looking down.” His lips turn up. “But every astronaut needs to have her feet on the ground sometime.”

Ben Tamura is my favorite gravitational pull.

I take his hand and kiss the palm.

“You hold me, too, you know,” I whisper against it, the universe of me in the palm of his hand.

His eyes turn glassy.

“I’m so sorry, Ben. All these months. I—”

He stops me with a salty, sweet kiss. “Save your apologies for all the heart attacks you’re going to give me when you’re a fighter pilot, hm?”

I squeeze him a little tighter. “Thank you for the meteorite.”

“I promise I won’t get you rocks for every occasion. Despite being a geophysicist, I do have some self-control. But I thought you might like that one.”