The Light That Outlived Its Star

The astronomer counts the star as bright, forgetting it may have gone dark a thousand years before the count began. What she measures is not the star but its debt, paid out photon by photon across a distance that erases the difference between existing and having existed. The star does not know it is being watched. It does not know it is gone. Somewhere between the collapse and the counting, there is a version of the sky that is entirely fiction, agreed upon by every eye that lifts to it. The dark, when it finally arrives, will take centuries to notice.