The Gravity of Loss.

1. Ignition
Once upon a burning grain of sand, I wished for a bright and beautiful Dutch ballet-dancer called Marianna. She had long blonde curly hair, deep-blue eyes, and a smile as bright as any star.
My wish was answered - well over sixteen years later – with a bright and beautiful Spanish salsa dancer called Arianna. She had long dark curly hair, deep-brown eyes, and a smile as bright as any star.
Now, decades later, it is obvious, that I had under-estimated the gravitational effect of six thousand sunsets on the arc of my wish. It also seems obvious that I shouldn’t have wished at the end a long day in the pub.

2. Lift Off
Wishing on a star is not as easy as poets would have us believe.
Do they mean comets, meteors, or stars, or even satellites? Taking it to extremes, it could be a titanium spanner that some space-cowboy has dropped in the celestial works.
But if I have understood anything from the countless theorems and hypotheses coming out of the University of Hollywood, the romantic, wannabee lover needs to wish, not upon a constant, and common, burning ball of radioactive hydrogen, but upon the, whimsically fleeting and unreliable, “falling” or transiting celestial body, or particle.
For simplicity’s sake, let us assume they mean meteors.
It would save us a lot of hand wringing, if poets were as sensitive about astronomical terminology as they are about prepositions and their ethereal and romantic notions.
Anyway. Now, we must predict, precisely, where and when one (a meteor, not a poet) will burn its way across our sky, then we need to calculate the coincidence, or the intersection, of our wish with the, so-called, “star’s” celestial trajectory.
We shall need to have determined our wish’s mean velocity, having reckoned for the drag of doubt or disbelief, and for the gravitational pull of a heavy heart, even for the dynamic efficiency of the syntax and lexis used in expressing it.
Pitiful exclamations of woe and tristesse sent into the heavens, over a tear-stained cambric sleeve only serve to muddy the waters.
It was discovered, apocryphal years ago, by the Head of Melancholic Forlornness at the metaphysics department of The Oh Christ! College, Cambridge, that unless precise attention is paid to the quantum minutiae of the grammatical expression of our wishes, they may turn back in the air and contaminate us with the “friendly fire” of our own rash romance.
We need, also, to gauge the angle of response, bearing in mind the centrifugal and centripetal forces of the world’s spin and orbit over the duration of our computed time-wish continuum, if we are to be in the right place on the Earth’s surface when our granted wish arrives. And all of this in just the fraction of a second that the star burns.
Apparently, hundreds of beautiful Dutch ballet dancers have found themselves romantically involved with the wrong person, due to sloppy calculation and vaguely expressed desires.
All in all, modern internet dating services are more practical. They neither cost you the Earth, nor the capacity to recognise when you are already in Heaven.

3. Fallout
Not even Einstein was able to figure out the gravity of loss.
Even he mis-calculated the influence of un-balanced men
on the purity of his balanced equation.
So now, I have lost faith in pure romance and impure science.
Which is why I can be found, on summer's nights,
watching sparks of space dust showering us with light,
wishing for no more than this turning heaven wishes me.