Never Date a Guy from Tatooine

Story Sent in by Lael:

Craig and I were having a perfectly normal first-date dinner at a perfectly normal Italian restaurant. Back then, I was pretty picky when it came to meeting guys offline, so the fact that it had already made it this far bode pretty well for things. He was a really nice guy, but a little slow on the uptake. Still, I kept him laughing, so that was good.

We talked about various summer activities we had done when he said, "Do you remember the two suns?"

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I urged him to explain more. At first, I thought he meant "Two sons."

He went on, "For two or three summers in a row, I think from 1987 to 1989, right? You remember? When there were two suns in the sky? Together? Two suns? The scientists had no idea what was happening? Two suns? Together in the sky together? Two of them? Suns? Two suns?"

I confessed that I had no recollection of such a thing. He went on, "Okay, there's one sun in the sky, right? One sun? Okay, so for two summers, back in the 80s, I swear I'm not making this up, there were two suns. In the sky. Two of them. Suns. Two suns."

"I think I'd remember that."

"I'm surprised you don't," he said, "Two suns in the sky at once. You'd have to be insane to not take note of that."

I nodded and turned my attention to my dinner. When our waitress came by again, he asked her if she remembered the "summers of two suns," but she didn't. She promised him, though, that she'd look it up when she went home.

Unbidden, he went on to describe the two suns to me: "One was our regular sun, but the other one was smaller and white. It orbited, I think, around our sun. I don't remember, but it's one of the biggest scientific mysteries of our time. Where did that second sun come from? And where did it go? Where is it now?"

Apparently, that last question wasn't rhetorical. He asked again, "Where is it now?"

I replied, "I don't know."

He said, "Someone out there does. Could be you. Who knows?"

I promise I didn't. While I hoped that the conversation would turn elsewhere, he wound up doodling a picture of two suns on his paper napkin. "I'm not insane, I promise you," he said as dinner wound down, "There were two suns in the sky at once. Here, I drew this picture for you. It's of two suns. Together. Two of them. Suns."

The two suns might have been together, but Craig and I never went out together, again.