Alexis said, “You’re my star.”

She waited 58 years before getting a reply, but her intended recipient, Brock, only replied 116 years after she said those words. His reply was simple: “Even if you weren’t literally one, you’d always be my star.” She smiled when she heard him speak. She hadn’t smiled upon receiving the earlier response from a star named Kimmy, who was located perfectly in between Alexis and Brock. The reply said: “Aw. Cute potatoes. But knowbody love Kimmy, ja?” Kimmy was right. Brock’s response had taken 116 years, but it wasn't because Brock didn’t care. In fact, a 116-year-long wait wasn’t that long for stars—some of Alexis’s closer friends often had to wait thousands of years to hear from their loved ones. To her, a hundred years was a single wave in the history of an ocean. Being stars—him a white dwarf and her a red giant—light was the fastest and, indeed, the only way they could communicate. Few know that the real reason the Milky Way twinkles in the night is because the stars are full of helium and things to say.

She thought for a little, not long at all, and glowed, then dimmed, then shined, telling Brock that actually he looked better; his white glow on that dark backdrop accentuated all his features, his chiseled form, so well that it made her want to come over and eat him, and that sorry, sorry for being blunt, but she just didn't know of a more perfecter way to word it. 314 years later, on Earth, a machine ticked along, plotting a graph of her light emission rise and fall, recording its measurements by tracing crests of waves in blue ink onto plain white paper. The crests were Alexis’s voice, but on Earth they were just another stack of readings falling endlessly into a box titled “UA-1982.”

Fifty-eight years later, she received a response from Kimmy: “That’s the wurst pickup lime I’ve ever herd. Really? You really said ‘more perfecter’?” Alexis sighed in her head, then smiled and replied: “Maybe you’re single because your standards are too high?”

Another fifty-eight years of silence from Kimmy and Brock passed before she heard from them, both at the same time. From Brock came, “Come over and eat me, then. I dare you, hottie, and I’m looking forward to it… In other news, the lifeforms on the planet a few light-years from me, the one I keep telling you about, just discovered how to make solar-powered ships by harnessing the radiated energy. It’s fascinating stuff, they’re whizzing all over the place.”

A little later, Alexis got another message from Brock, saying, “Shut the fuck up, Kimmy, I liked the pickup line. And learn to spell sometime, maybe.” This made Alexis smile, and over the next few years she heard her neighbors chuckle about it as they received the news.

And from Kimmy: “Maybe I’m single because nobody meets my perfectly reasonable standards, Alexis. Hmm? If I ever talk to a girl I’d have better pickup lines than that.”

Twinkle twinkle, went Alexis as she replied, “That’s incredible, Brock. My lifeforms have only just started launching rockets into space, but they've made them reusable. I have to say I’m impressed. Nobody else I’ve heard of has ever managed to build something in space before terraforming at least one other planet, but these little bipeds have put together a space station. It feels like just yesterday they were faking landings on their moon! They grow up so fast. Anyways—I was thinking, looking at you from all the way over here, and I’ve come to the conclusion that you’d be the brightest tool in any box they put you in. You’re so bright.”

She talked to her neighbors about the meaning of life, suggested some exercises to her friend Quaxion that could ease a bad case of surface turmoil, et cetera. The kinds of things that stars do. Fifty-eight years later, a message from little Kimmy arrived. He said, “Oh, yikes. Is that really what you meant to say to Brock? How the hell do you still have a boyfriend?”

And one from Brock: “Kimmy, you could say whatever the fuck you want after starting a sentence with “If I ever talk to a girl.” Yeah. If you ever talk to a girl, you’ll make no mistakes. You’ll move to a different arm of the Galaxy to be closer to her, I bet. You’ll develop water-based lifeforms on your surface? If you ever talk to a girl, hell, I’ll stop telling you to shut the fuck up all the time.”

58 years passed. Brock replied, “Oh, Alexis. You make me all warm inside. Even when you call me a tool. I shine so bright it’s clear you turn me on. My little life-form guys are getting good! They’ve started harvesting energy from the surface of their sun, but I fear they’re not ready for the problems this will cause down the line.”

On Earth, an automated listening station picked up Alexis’s response as erratic changes in brightness and, as it was not trained to handle out-of-the-ordinary occurrences, notified its senior AI agent of the anomaly. The AI agent made note of this issue and told the listening station to flag any future recurrence of this phenomenon. The agent claimed “the effect will be studied,” though as it was modelled after human intelligence, it was lazy, and planned to never research the things it said it would. It was unsupervised; who would know?

Alexis’s response to Brock was short, as updates about a civilization often are. For most stars, there was nothing past the talking stage—flirting and trading obscene (as obscene as possible, when every interaction is public) and detailed descriptions of what one would do to the other if only they were together… The next 116 years passed quickly. Finally Brock’s response came, but it sounded, almost, weaker. He had lost some of his brightness. Perhaps he’d gotten sick.

“Alexis, it’s been quite a century for my lifeforms! They’ve figured out interstellar travel and now feed off many stars for their energy. I’m one of them, in fact! I’m very happy to support them; I feel a little more fatigued, but I too must make sacrifices for progress, as so many of their scientists have. They are doing some really crazy things—they can terraform a world in less than one of your years, can you believe that? I think of you always, and I wish I could tell you what I’d do to you without Kimmy saying anything.”

At the same time, Alexis heard from Kimmy, who said, “I wood never say any thing two interfere with you to.”

Ah, shut the fuck up, Kimmy, thought Alexis. “That’s great to hear, Brock. You do look handsome as always, but be safe. Don’t let them take you down, please. For me? Oh, and—shut the fuck up, Kimmy. And learn to spell.”

Brock’s reply came in just 36 years. It was rushed, perhaps panicked: “These lifeforms are progressing so fast. Perhaps too fast. I may have gotten in deeper than I planned; they have harvested so much energy that I am now too weak to fight back, and I fear it is only a matter of time, Alexis.”

“I’m hear if you knead to taulk,” Kimmy’s, for once compassionate, message trailed on the heels of Brock’s. The thought was welcome, but she didn’t take Kimmy up on it.

The next few years were the more sorrowful ones of Alexis’s life, as she watched Brock’s bright light in the sky fade, faster and faster, into the all-encompassing darkness they shared. She heard Brock’s voice, too, as it got weaker and weaker. He told her of the progress his lifeforms were making, of the way they could rearrange constellations, of the writers and poets; he read her poems he had written. Wrenching tales of emptiness and a growing feeling of hunger. And his voice was getting weak, scratchy. The monitoring station 314 light-years away, on Earth, flagged this as an anomaly; its autonomous supervisor claimed it was just the natural course of things. And the recordings piled up in box TK-0079, a floor above UA-1982’s box.

One day, Alexis heard, so faintly, Brock whispering “I love you. Thank you, Alexis, and stay strong.” 314 years later, the machine tracking TK-0079 heard these words—though it did not know what they meant, or even that they were words—and recorded “END OF TRANSMISSION.” The paper stopped falling into the box, and the machine powered down.

She struggled to make out these last faint whispers coming from Brock, and, looking now in his direction, she saw a light, fifty-eight light years away, twinkle and go out. Alexis continued burning, red with fury and giant, swollen with the emotion welling up inside her, in the black void that had once framed Brock’s features so well. Stars can’t cry.