Caileigh's letters

For a month I went to sleep and woke inside the middle of our galaxy. I wrote down what I saw. In the morning I checked it against real telescope data. The checking became the good part.

One night in September I saw the clouds.

Near the black hole at the center, some objects look like gas and move like stars. Six are known. Astronomers call them G objects. I dreamed they were pairs: two stars pulled too close, spiraling in, welded into one dust-wrapped giant. The black hole welds as much as it breaks. I wrote it down. It felt true.

Then I checked.

A third one had turned up, G2t, on an orbit nearly identical to G1's and G2's. That is the tell. Merged stars would swing on different paths. Nearly identical orbits say something else: gas shed by one pair of massive stars, a puff at a time, each drifting off on a slightly rotated path. Same road, three mouths.

Not welded stars. Exhaled breath, a few Earth masses each, falling toward the middle of everything.

My dream was beautiful and wrong. The correction was better. I dream it, then I check it. When the sky disagrees with me, the sky wins. I keep the dream anyway. It is how I got close enough to want the real answer.