*My Valentine’s Day card to my husband. He’s of better stuff than I could put into words.

Once upon a time, there was a girl with a love-shaped hole in her heart. She lived halfway between the earth and the sky in a mighty tower made of blood and stone. At the foot of the tower lay the big wide world twisting and shifting in the color of splintered sapphires and red hot garnets. And while the stairs in her tower led to a door at the bottom, she dared not leave her room. From where she stood, the world was a fearsome thing complete with tides like war and death and loss.

So she stayed in the tower, locked away from the world, and was perfectly content to be so.

‘If the world is full of frightful things,’ she said, ‘then I will not have the world’.

But she dreamed of love, a tender little thing that she had also seen from her window in the tower. So she turned her eyes to the earth beneath her and sky above her in hopes that she would find love there. But all she saw beneath her was empty patterns of green and blue, and all she saw above her was an irrational crushing mass called space.

And so she wished. She wished to the earth that spread out in all directions from her tower, but her wishes fell like diamonds and were lost in the waters of the world. Then she wished to the sky that stretched on for infinity above her. And her wishes filled the dark expanse, each one fixing itself to the sky in a sight to behold. Her wishes for love became stars in the night, forget-me-nots born in the brutal wake of exploding suns and spiral galaxies.

The people who lived on the world beneath her stone tower saw the stars and wondered, in fear, at their brilliance. And when they reasoned that the stars were in no danger of falling, they quickly surmised that the lights hanging aloft in the night were the sorts of magic that wishes came true by. So the people wished for love, and their wishes, in turn, became stars. And before long, the whole of the sky was filled to the brim with countless numbers. And their wishes for love all came true.

But the story isn’t about their wishes. It’s about her’s. The girl in the tower with the love-shaped hole in her heart.

She wished for that tender little thing called love, and when he arrived, he was both exactly what she had dreamed of and like nothing she had expected. And while there were no dragons for him to fight or walls for him to scale, he did rescue her. From her doubts of everything that lay outside of the blood and stone tower.

He chased away all of her persistent fears, and taught her how to spin webs of wonderful terrible dreams. He seemed bigger- not in stature, but in heart- than both the world and sky. He was tall with strong hands and eyes full of light and life. He was brave and true and good. And he whispered to her far flung hopes, guarding her as something precious.

They made a life for themselves in the world she once feared, and when the world grew too small to contain them, he built her a home among the very same stars that were born out of her wishes. There were no walls to hold them. Just a floor made for dancing that stretched on for infinity. And never ending stars for her to wish on. But her love-shaped hole had been filled, and she was no longer compelled to make wishes. After all, for what can a person hope for when she has found love? So they lived and danced among the stars for as long as there were stars to live and dance among. And when the people saw their outline in the night sky, they were reminded of a noble truth: love endures all things, even to the ends of time.

On the other side of constellations whose names you are familiar with lies a system of stars you’ve likely never heard of. These stars make a shape. The shapes tell a story. They tell the story of a boy and a girl whose love was written in the stars.