It’s so lonely in here, my love.
They dropped me here, in space, in nowhere. I am lost.
My love, they have left me alone here, looking for you.
Cluster after cluster. Star after star. I navigate through the dark, searching for your light.
I remember what they told me before I left.
They told me there was no proof you existed.
They told me that even if you did, the universe was too vast, and the chances of finding you were so fantastically small that they were almost impossible to measure.
I think they wanted me to be afraid.
I think I was too hopeful to understand fear.
But I know I have to do this.
I have to look for you.
Every night, I dream of you.
Or perhaps I did.
It’s difficult to remember the difference anymore.
You were always there.
A voice I had never heard, yet somehow remembered. A face I had never seen, yet recognized. In every dream, you were waiting somewhere beyond the sky, and every morning I woke with the same unbearable certainty:
You are out here.
They asked me why I was willing to leave everything behind for someone I could not prove existed.
I told them I didn’t know.
That was a lie.
The truth is, I have known you all my life.
I just didn’t know your name.
R.
I’ll soar through these endless skies for only one sight of your starlight.
And if I don’t find you, my love, then let me become another star.
Perhaps then, wherever you are, you will finally find me.
The following is believed to be the final transmission received from Khaled’s vessel.
His signal disappeared twenty three minutes later.
The search party never found the ship.
The last recorded coordinates were between two unnamed galaxies, beyond the final mapped cluster.
There was nothing there.
Or so we thought.