Twenty-Eight Years of Light
Ten stops, beginning in our own solar system and carrying you outward — stop by stop — to the edge of what a telescope can touch. The light arriving tonight from your anniversary star left in 1998. It has been traveling to reach you ever since.
Twenty-eight years. Fifty-three million light years.
You began tonight just a few light-minutes from home, watching Venus set over
the western hills. You end here, in a galaxy 53 million years away, having
crossed more distance in one evening than the mind can honestly hold.
Somewhere between those two points, a star you'll never visit sent you a gift —
light it released the year you married, arriving on this exact night, for you.
The universe is vast and mostly empty and magnificently indifferent.
But you are here, and you found it, and that is everything.
Happy Anniversary.