Moon

“I love you to the moon and back.”

No, fuck that. I love you Saturn and back. To Jupiter and back. To the roaming asteroids and back. I love you to the ends of the solar system and back. I love you to the fiery furnace of the most distant star, where hydrogen collides with hydrogen and forms the building blocks of not just our galaxy, but the entire universe. I love you to the place where star collides upon star, where nothing but energy can survive. I love you to where a supermassive star collapses on itself, a singularity, a black hole, where even space and time bend to its will.

I love you to the deepest, darkest, coldest depths of the ocean, where giant squids fear to roam and all the bones of all the animals that ever swam the oceans settle into a fine powder, never to be disturbed again.

I love you into the fury of the volcanoes, into the death and destruction the wrought both then and now. I love you into the crushing pressure of stone upon stone for mile, the inescapable grind of the of Earth.

No. Not quite. I love you to the barest atom, the smallest electron, to the the quarks and neutrinos and gluons, to where matter may exist and may not and perhaps everything is probability and math or nothing more than energy. I love to to where time ends and where time began, where matter started and where it will end. I love you there.

I love you into death, through death, and past death. For my love death is barely a whisper upon a desert.

But I don’t love you back. No. My love for you has no return, it has no end. Time may end. Space may end. Matter may end. We will end. But my love for you is boundless, unable to be contained by even the fundamental forces of this universe, or any others.

…but that doesn’t fit as well on a tattoo.