Theia
Gwyneth Findlay
‘The giant impact hypothesis [proposed that] toward the end of the planetary accumulation process, the protoearth collided with a planetary body having a substantial fraction of its mass.’ 1
‘The Moon is thought to be the product of such a Giant Impact. […] I refer to this extinct impacting Moon-forming parent planet by the name ‘Theia’, the mother of Selene, the Greek Goddess of the Moon.’ 2
1 Cameron, A.G.W. ‘From interstellar gas to the Earth-Moon system’. Meteoritics & Planetary Science, Vol. 36, No. 1 (2001). 13.
2 Halliday, Alex N. ‘Terrestrial accretion rates and the origin of the Moon’. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Vol. 176, No. 1 (2000). 21.
I was born the same way you were: amid violent collisions in a hot plane of swirling gas, the accretions of our dead elders coming together to form new life. The fabric of my being danced for millennia around a rapidly expanding ball of fusion and flame, forming and crashing and growing anew among billions of bits of other one-day masses, all bound wild and steady in this new sun’s orbit.
Once, I was small. I was tiny. I was a speck of dust. I was shaken by passing clumps of matter, tossed about in the expanse until I met other specks of dust. They too were me, and together we became a clump, like a pebble, like a nugget, like nothing we had known before. And then our – my – clump met another clump, and it was also me, and in the shock of our meeting we became one.
I continued to assemble myself, my pieces encountering each other in the vast cloud of dust and saying, Oh, it’s you! You’re me! We’re us! The invitation reached every piece of me suspended near my orbit, beckoning each fragment to come home.
Sometimes I was cold, so cold I could not explain my sensations. Other times I was brutally hot, daring fate with my uneven shuffle through the cosmos. I swung to and fro as my siblings coalesced around our Mother Sun. I passed them by, near or far: the gaseous giants that spun rapid, rambunctious; the molten balls of rock that never strayed far from the sun’s hot comfort. Our nursery raged with chaos, but our family, at last, was forming. After a thousand eras as particles in the ether, we had found the pieces of ourselves. We had found each other.
We were all the same age, cosmically speaking. Mother Sun was our centre, our vitality, our raison d’être, but we were not born of her, as children are often born of mothers. This sun and her children sprung from the same stuff: our molecular cloud collapsed, and a family emerged.
Young and mischievous, we played together, craving camaraderie. Yet Mother Sun kept us separated in her domain, circling her at different speeds and distances. On occasion, more infrequently than the flare of a distant comet, she allowed us to align for the briefest moment, for a whisper of this existence. Then we returned to our paths, our balance across her pocket of sky.
One of my fellow rocky planets twirled near to the sun, though not so close that she became brittle or choked with gas. Her region was comfortable, even; warm and illuminated. After my initial journey from the outskirts toward Mother Sun, I danced circles along this sister’s orbit, at times so intimately that I could feel the heat radiating from her fiery surface. I was so much smaller than her, and I had so little to offer in return. I simply rejoiced in the moments I could be near her, could exchange cosmic companionship amid the fury smouldering across our young sky.
We spoke of the future, of our aspirations for the time after we all settled into our rhythms among the stars. What would we do? Who did we hope to be? In my fantasy, a calm eternity stretched ahead of us, the routine of communal life spinning happily along until Mother Sun expanded and reclaimed many of our family’s scattered parts into her whole. My sister, though, held wondrous visions: of love, of life, of children more numerous than all the suns of the galaxy.
Her revelation disquieted Mother Sun, and titterings about her prospects spread among our siblings. I came to learn that the vitality my sister desired was unlikely, even impossible, on her dry, fiery surface. The distant bodies whispered about a bond of hydrogen and oxygen, a molecule essential for facilitating this life she sought. Yet this building block only developed far from Mother Sun’s warming glow, in the region where I came into being. I examined myself and found it: the water my sister lacked. The bitter luck of formation, of finding my parts in the gaseous sea, had bestowed it upon me while my sister was barren.
I cradled this burdensome discovery for many rotations. I could not bear to conceal this sole hope until the end of our time. In the dark, lonely patches of our sky, I devised a solution.
I said farewell to my siblings, though they did not realise it was goodbye. I waited until each one had passed, until I had sent my love to the very reaches of Mother Sun’s solar expanse.
Lastly, to my most beloved sister, I said,
I love you.
I’m sorry.
Remember me.
She did not have time to react. We were moving so quickly, and I’d manoeuvred myself so close. Mother Sun, powerless but desperate, whipped plasma into my path, as if the magnetic pulse could interrupt my indomitable trajectory. My tiny body collided into my sister’s side, and I became nothing but chunks of rock and clouds of dust.
Debris exploded from my sister, too, but she was not devoured. As we whirled along her orbit, her mass gained control of our distant fragments. Parts of me became parts of her, coalescing under her gravitational influence, and what remained created something entirely new: a moon, large and looming, circling her as I had once circled Mother Sun. It spun, then slowed, its face steadily focused on her, on us – now siblings bound as one, two beings in two bodies yet separated by none.
After millions of orbits in these new forms, the rumours proved true: life, that impossible endeavour, sprang up from our oceans. It evolved in billions of ways, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. Some grew to know us, to embody the love that had brought them into being. They named us – their home – Earth, and our second body they called Moon. Many of their years passed before they remembered me; the old me, as I had been before my sacrifice made us whole. They named me Theia, after the Moon’s mother in one of their fading cosmologies. Now I dream of embracing each human and saying: I am the Moon, and you are my child, and my love begat all the life you’ve ever known.
Gwyneth Findlay is a writer and editor living in the North East. Her writing has appeared in The Hellebore, The Primer, and the Aberdeen-based Leopard Arts. Find her around the internet @findlaypum.
Theia was first published in The Primer, 2023