Rebecca decided she would need to live forever the first time she fell in love.

She was eight and had just learned what a horse was. She'd never seen anything like it—muscle and glistening hide, and the long toss of a mane over a curved neck. She had been told she was too young to learn to ride—experienced the profound frustration of not being there yet. And if there was such a thing as too young, then there was such a thing as too old. It worried her when she had barely begun to learn about worry.

How to live forever?

Rebecca decided again she would need to live forever, that second time she fell in love. Sixteen, and a book that spun out a tale like no other, golden words to consume her mind and light up her heart. How long did it take to tell a story like that? How long to tell ten, or a hundred, more? How could anyone have all the time it would take to pour forth every ounce of the love in their heart?

She fell in love a hundred more times, again and again. Why shouldn't she? She had too much yearning in her to keep herself to just one thing. She gathered loves like a magpie, greedy for every shining joy—shellfish and magnets, gardens and penicillin, lace and the circuit-song of quantum computing.

Stardust.

Rebecca gazed into the heart of the universe and all she could do was love it boundlessly—this thing to which she was barely a speck, but had made her and all her love. She did not expect to be loved in return. Indeed, she expected nothing from it, save an understanding that would unfold to her if she gave it time.

Time—of which there was never enough.

She was decades older and a world away from home when she found time. It came to her veiled in mathematics like glittering spiderwebs, laws of physics bent aside under the force of their own being, this thing that she had crossed the stars to study. The dark mirror by which she meant to understand her true love.

She spun it like starlight on a drop-spindle, her own self the counterweight, rising, rising—the twist moving from hand to spindle, flesh to dark matter.

Rebecca would love this universe until it unraveled, until there was nothing left in it to understand, no room remaining in the wet matter of her brain and the red pound of her heart. And was that not the highest duty of love—to understand better than any other?