Alas, my sweetheart and I were separated by the force of the Eruption. Hurled out of the Earth's gravity well and flung into deep space along diverging trajectories, I watched as she cartwheeled into the heart of the galaxy.
Meanwhile, I was sucked into the warp stream of a fleet of passing starships. They were accelerating in the opposite direction, out of the Milky Way entirely, out into nothingness, toward the dark-matter borders of the known universe.