MORE DISTANT THAN I COULD IMAGINE, BUT I LOVE HER!

Our relationship began as so many do, online, but turned into a fly-by love affair. My heart was immediately captured by her message because of her refreshingly unique introduction. Her message was concise, but it said everything to me: “For me, you alone are my destiny.” Even though this message completely captured my heart and “Love Conquers All” had always been my philosophy, I realized that there could never be a meeting between us, and our love was destined to be fleeting at best. I replied, in the best way to sum up my feelings: “My love for you is everything to me. Your wish to me is a command.”

She was an inhabitant of the meteor-comet-starship that had come from outside our solar system and was visiting us briefly while her craft sped past our planet at roughly 150,000 miles per hour on its way to who-knew-where. The name that Earth’s astronomers had given it was 3I/Atlas, and it was scheduled to pass Earth in 2025 on a very eccentric orbit. It would come closest to Earth in July, but I had received her message back in late 2024 in the weirdest email I had ever received. The message was from ‘ImtheONE’ and piqued my interest immediately, even though it sounded slightly hokey. The contents of the email revealed that she was a traveler who was on a long trip, and she needed me to receive her special message about me being her destiny.

The saddest part of our doomed-to-be-Platonic affair was that, because of the “I” in 3I/Atlas, she was destined to leave our solar system and head back out into the larger interstellar arena of the Milky Way Galaxy, quite possibly forever. Unless…

Looking back, it seemed foolish for me to give my heart so easily to this probable tease. How did I know that it wasn’t just a broadcast email that could have appeared on countless computers on many platforms? The truth is, I didn’t, but I felt such an intensely personal impact when I opened her message. How did I know that the sender was a female? I didn’t, but I knew, nonetheless, because the flavor of her message was all female to me, due to the way she firmly told me what she knew about our shared destiny. She knew our fates were forever entwined and entangled. She made it impossible for me to believe any other future was available to me but to love her and her alone for the rest of my life!

“How crazy is this?” I asked myself. To give the rest of your life to somebody you would never meet face-to-face is the height of stupidity! To forsake all others, to dream of nobody but her. And yet, I did so voluntarily, without looking back. I was so desperately in love.

I hopefully asked her to describe herself, and her description was exactly what I should have expected. She replied, “I’m really just a normal teenage girl.” This told me everything, but it told me nothing. She had no frame of reference outside what she knew, and her race was all she knew. She may have had ears on her elbows, if she even had ears or elbows. She may have been able to see colors that we couldn’t detect or wavelengths that had no color, while she was unable to see the range of colors that we take for granted in a sighted person. She may have been a ten-mile-high entity or one that would fit into the palm of my hand. So many possibilities, and as it turned out, it became meaningless for me to think of her size. When I asked her more about herself, she gave a cryptic but telling answer. “I am one of many who are all me,” because her presence on the ship was as an intelligent single egg-cell from her entire body. She actually occupied billions of starships across our galaxy. As a being spread over such a large area, her size was so much vaster than my own that it was astonishing to me how she would ever devote more than a single cell’s worth of consciousness to me. Our relationship became more baffling the longer it lasted. Our future seemed doomed from the start.

So, there I was. Totally and helplessly in love with a woman I could never meet, who may be totally unappealing to any human. How would I cope? How to live the rest of my life with no hope of ever uniting with the object of my passion? Would I have to accept some other mate as a suitable substitute for the true love of my life? Some people make that switch in their minds, or even their souls. I could not. I had to find a way for us to meld with her physically. If only one of my cells could meet one of hers, it would be the most meaningful expression of love in the whole galaxy, maybe even the entire Universe. But I wasn’t interested in setting or breaking records. I needed to join with her, that was all.

My mind labored obsessively, without rest, on how to make our joining occur. All it would cost me would be my life. No big deal, right? My life would be meaningless without her, so my physical life would be a trivial sacrifice. Then, driven by my need as a salmon is driven to swim upstream, I came up with a totally insane idea.

I reached out to her with my proposal. I knew she would be agreeable if she could wait just a little longer (cosmically speaking). On the other hand, I could barely wait for her response.

Her message back told me that, although she was eager to start our lives together, my plan seemed to be the only way we could do so. When she accepted, I was ecstatic! I wanted to celebrate right then and there. But there was now so much work to be done. To start with, I had to contact some astrophysicists I knew in order to pick their brains about a very important aspect of her trip. Then, I had two inquiries to make about a special donation and a special living arrangement for an extended period of time. Timing was everything if my plan was going to succeed.

* *

So, now that eighty-five years and fifty-four days have passed since I stored my frozen sperm, I have come out of my suspended animation for a very important date. With a lot of money and my whole life invested in this gamble, my rocket ship is waiting and ready for my departure. Her spaceship is just entering our solar system again, on its eccentric orbit around the sun, as one of my astrophysicist friends told me it would. Everything is ready to go. After my ship is launched, its trajectory will be directed to an intercept point with her ship’s path. Now, there is just one more, very important item, in addition to my genetic contribution, that must be resolved before our very important meeting.

She wants me to describe my dream of our shared future. What shall I tell her?