Lessons From the Kissing Booth

Phobos, the larger of Mars' two moons, lives too close to the red planet and so is slowly being seduced ever closer by the tidal forces. Some day it will reach a point where it will either come crashing to the surface or, more likely, break into pieces and become a ring around Mars that will spiral excruciatingly down, to settle on the land, and be gone. Another layer of dust on top of the layers of dust already there, which were once also part of some other celestial body.

I think about that dust often, sifting silently through something less than air. It all cuts in parabolas, driven by the excruciating careen of whatever is biggest and closest. Eventually some of everything has to meet, falling invisibly into and through each other's orbit, what was separate becoming altogether something else. In those moments, I think, the past becomes like the second when films falls off of the projector, burnt through by the light, everything suddenly white.