Love and loneliness start with the same letter, yet it is our understanding of them that leads to such different endings.
What am I even thinking?
I am Ryn Asterin, a sixteen-year-old living a simple life, just another student lost in the monotony of high school. In a world advanced enough to travel beyond the Milky Way, the day of the Great Launch was being broadcast live across the globe.
Curious to see it, I rushed home the moment the final bell rang. My bag thudded rhythmically against my back as I sprinted. When I burst through the door, my little sisters were playing excitedly, but my mother stood by the window, her expression tight with tension. I asked what was wrong, but she didn't answer. I turned to the TV. A massive meteorite, nearly the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, dominated the screen.
The world's nations had united, deploying experimental nuclear and atomic weapons to intercept it. They succeeded, but only partially. The fragments rained down across the globe—and one of them crashed directly into my front yard.
As an astronomy enthusiast, I knew the government wouldn't let me keep it. It wasn't as titanic as it looked on screen; it was a dense, heavy boulder, weighing about four kilograms. I grabbed a hammer and nails, desperate to break off a piece, but it wouldn't even chip. After a while, its color began to fade and the surface started to crumble. I gathered the shards and hid them just as a team of astronomers arrived. They swept up the main rock and left without a word.
I hurried to my room—an airy space with a single bed in the corner and a desk cluttered with research guides and novels. I had decorated it with plants and earthy tones to keep myself grounded. Above the room was a small attic that housed my workshop, where my telescope pointed perpetually toward the sky. On a wooden workbench sat drawers stuffed with research notes, empty diaries, and scattered tools.
I began analyzing the eight fragments I had salvaged. Each possessed strange, undefined properties; they appeared in different colors depending on who looked at them. My sister noticed something even stranger: three of the stones lost their hue after being exposed to the Earth's atmosphere for three hours, while the others remained vibrant.
The stones emitted a high-frequency vibration that fried every piece of modern equipment I used to test them. Worse, whenever I touched them, my heartbeat spiked, my hands trembled, and a wave of nausea rose in my chest. I vomited three times that day, my eyes bloodshot and my skin deathly pale.
Exhausted, I finally fell into a fitful sleep—and for the first time in five years, I dreamed.
In the dream, a blurred figure stood before me—a woman. She drifted closer and whispered, "Be aware."
Suddenly, a blinding flash of light, heat, and sound swallowed everything. Before she vanished, she smiled. "Don't forget who you are. I have high hopes for you, my Ryn."
I woke up trembling, tears stinging my eyes. How could I remember every detail of that dream so vividly? And who was she?