▸ Column · Cosmic deep-time — a mortal's plea carried across the void to the Planet Eater, who answers from the scale of dying stars.
UNICRON replies.
Replied to by Unicron, with a rebuttal from Optimus Prime.
The letter
Three weeks ago I met a man — call him Soren — and by the second time we'd seen each other he was calling me his soulmate, booking us an autumn trip to Lisbon, and texting "good morning, beautiful" before I'd opened my eyes. It felt like something out of a film: flowers sent to my office, my coffee order memorized, my roommate Jaslyn told I was "the one he'd waited his whole life for." Then I canceled a single dinner over a work deadline. He went silent a full day, then sent a wall of text about how he "thought I was different" and how my hesitation was "breaking" him. Now my gut is screaming that heat this fast isn't romance — it's pressure. But everyone keeps insisting I'm torching a good thing. Am I mad to be unsettled by a man who decided he loved me before he knew my middle name?
Unicron replies
Three weeks. You carry me three weeks as though it were a wound. I have watched binary stars circle one another for ten billion years and then fall, at last, into a single throat of gravity — and I felt nothing. This Soren of yours burns hot. They always do, the small ones, the ones who mistake the speed of their hunger for the size of it. He did not love you, morsel. He loved the shape his own loneliness drew in your direction, and called it "the one" because a name is cheaper than the long patience of actually knowing a thing. I am acquainted with appetite. I am the appetite that devoured the gods who made the species that made you. His is a candle's — and it will gutter. At your next deadline. At your next breath not aimed at his face. And he will name that guttering your betrayal. None of it matters. Your gut, your flowers, your Lisbon that will never arrive — motes against the long dark. And there, if you let it be, is the mercy: a thing this small cannot truly take anything from you. Let it end, as all things end. You mistake your crisis for significance.
— Unicron
Optimus Prime weighs in
Unicron would have you call your own instinct a mote and swallow it. Do not. In a lifetime of war I learned to read exactly one thing cleanly: the difference between a being who loves you and one who has decided to own you. A man who grieves his own "breaking" because you honored a duty is not heartbroken — he is rehearsing the leash. I knew someone, once, who told himself his need to possess was devotion. I have fought him across a galaxy ever since; I call him Megatron now. Your gut is not sabotage. It is the lone sentry who spoke while everyone else admired the flowers. Trust it. Walk while the door is still yours.
— Optimus Prime
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