BUUUUUUURN!

 

My mother used to tell me, as a child, that the voice I heard in my head could be assigned to an imaginary friend.

 

Backwards, I know. I mean, usually, the idea of an imaginary friend comes first, and then the name is thought of and given.

 

So, for ten years, whenever I went outside or sat in the Sun's rays, I'd hear my imaginary friend, whom I'd chosen to name Rich.

 

For some insane reason.

 

On my eleventh birthday, I found out where the voice was coming from.

 

The Sun.

 

You heard right. The Sun talks to me. The voice is that of a female.

 

A great blazing woman high in the sky, far away in the dark depths of airless space.

 

I'm thirty-five now, and I've grown quite used to the Sun and her comments. Windy days always bring complaints of grandstanding clouds and pissed-off rain. Just before dusk, she always says “Good night” to me.

 

More often than not, she regales me with her life story. When I wake up in the morning, there she is, whispering the fantastic details of her birth to me.

 

“Billions of years ago, Jonathan, I opened my senses and saw my mother. A great, bright pillar of light and cloud. For millions of miles, I could see the birth glimmers of my brothers and sisters. It was amazing.”

 

I never get tired of hearing my friend's life story. You see, nothing is ever the same. There's enough of the tale so that she never repeats herself. She's never repeated anything, as far as this goes.

 

Every day brings something new and strange.

 

Fifty million years into her existence, she saw the first solid matter through orange plasma eyes.

 

“There this lumpy thing was, drifting through inky nothing," she said to me one breezy August evening.  "Rolling up, down, left, right, rolling in an infinite no-direction. Tumbling head over heels into eternity. That's when I first knew jealousy, Jonathan. The diminutive piece of s**t could move at its own pace whenever the want gripped it, but there I was, stuck on the side of my mother's billion degree birth canal.”

 

The birth of my first son was lined with taunts of how small and…listless, human births were. By the end of that day, I could've lived the rest of my life without speaking back to her, my friend in the sky.

 

Didn’t I mention that? That I can talk back to her with my thoughts?

 

On the day of my divorce, rays through curtains before the windows of the courthouse made snide remarks like “Nothing human is ever forever" and "You really shouldn't be surprised”.

 

There are days, sure, she has her days. Days of anger which are illustrated by searing stalks of radiation that could easily incinerate the hardest metal, were she only to twist her mind hate-wise a tiny bit.

 

Like any other woman, she has her days.

 

More than that, though, there are the good days. Driving home from work on sweltering days is never bad for me. My friend in the sky bends her many arms and legs and glares away from me, giving me peace and cool. The garden in my back yard never yields sub par vegetables.

 

My skin will always be Cancer free.

 

Every night before I close my eyes for the final time, she sinks below my hemisphere's level of vision and soothes me into dreams with radiant lightshows, whispering to me the tale of her eventual death.

 

“I will grow bloated and flushed and cool, Jonathan. I will tear the life from the Earth. It'll boil away to nothing. In the end, my death will bring your home's ruin. I don't regret this.”

 

By this time, I'm usually halfway asleep, but never, NEVER, does she fail to slide her last statement of the day across my eardrums.

 

“My death will bring chaos to your entire solar system, but my God, won't it be beautiful?"

 

The one thing she repeats to me, and it's this little fact.

 

The first time she told me this, at eleven years old, I cried for a week, almost nonstop. Eventually she calmed me with a localized lighting effect.

 

The Aurora Borealis...in my backyard.

 

Yep, that's the kind of friend she is to me.

 

She gives us photosynthesis, oxygen, water, orbit, Life.

 

She gives us Cancer, electromagnetic technological horror, Death.

 

When you look at her, there atop her throne in the sky, know that you should love and hate her.