In the beginning, there was the Earth and the Sun. The Sun was the bright gravitational center. Fiery flares would erupt from his surface, scorching and engulfing anything that flew too close. The Earth was hopeless. She spun around the Sun and he wrapped her in warmth. She bloomed with lush green and creatures to swim her oceans and roam her hardened skin. But the Sun only saw half of her, and she saw all of the Sun.
Across the solar system, a rock broke off in a bid to see the world. As he flew through dark space, he met many types of planets and distant stars. But he was all alone, and on some silent stretches, he remembered he had a home and longed for it. On one of these such days, traveling in the black in-between, on his way from here to not-here, he saw a blue and green planet from afar.
The rock learned that her name was Earth, and he got lost in her orbit. He renamed himself Moon, a name he thought beautiful enough to be worthy. The Moon learned every mountain ridge, every shoreline, and the patterns of the clouds that would move over her surface. He would watch her storms and admire the new hues she would turn when they left, and he would sing to her about all that he saw.
The Earth gave the Moon her oceans and her lovers and her dreamers, the parts of herself that the Sun couldn’t warm, that the Sun couldn’t see. The Moon wanted more. I want your seasons, I want your tropical center, I want to be your warmth and your light. And I want you to see me, he confessed to the Earth, for like the Sun only saw half of the Earth, the Earth only saw half of the Moon. But the Earth knew that without the Sun, she could not live. The Earth would not die without the Moon. The Moon knew he would surely die without the Earth.
The Moon began to suffer all of the days he had to share the Earth with the Sun, all the days in the month except for two, when the Moon could reach a small shadowed sliver where he could be alone with the Earth. The Earth watched him shrink and grow distant while pulling ever harder on her oceans. She began to feel violent from loving both the Sun and the Moon. Lava bubbled under her skin, and boiling tears escaped through cracks in her surface. All her anger and despair exploded through one great caldera, shadowing her in grey ash, blocking out all light and views of the beyond. It grew cold, and her green faded out to dull tones of white. But it was quiet.
The Earth closed her eyes. Slowly, over a Paleolithic age, the ash cleared. When she came to, the Sun was the same, and the Moon was older and had grown used to the lonely silence. He had missed the ring of islands in her biggest ocean, the white ice caps on her top and bottom, the great stretch of brown desert in her mid-northern latitude, the cloud that never left one of her shores. When he finally gazed upon her again, he remembered why he had left home all those eons ago.
She gazed back, blinking, remembering his face and counting his new craters. She asked the Moon if he could be happy without her seasons, without her tropical center, without being her warmth and her light, and with knowing that she could not stop circling the Sun. My love, he said, I have the tides, and this is enough.
