A GAME PLAYED BY GALAXIES
There is no way to describe the vast and complex feelings of two galaxies as they fall into one another, each ripping the other apart and being ripped apart by the other. To us it may seem like an act of violence or sex; from the perspective of the galaxies, however, it is more accurately described as a game--a game played over millennia, the ultimate end of which is one's destruction and recreation as a new being entirely. The rules of this game, defined as they are by vast timescales, immense forces, and impossible distances, are beyond our understanding, but in images of these colliding galaxies we can perhaps game some sense of the joy and virtuosity, even humor, with which galaxies play these games--reaching towards one another, siphoning off in spirals, peeling off long cotton-like threads of one another's arms; old stars collapsing, new stars flaming into existence, two black holes--hungry mouths--straining towards one another in the dark, orbits set into motion and disrupted, continual flux, continual play, a game with billions of pieces and two impossible ancient players, who know that playing this game will be the last thing they ever do.