Butterfly Nebula, NGC 6302 What resemble dainty butterfly wings are actually roiling cauldrons of gas heated to more than 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The gas is tearing across space at more than 600,000 miles an hour—fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 24 minutes. A dying star is at the center of this fury. It has ejected its envelope of gases and is now unleashing a stream of ultraviolet radiation that is making the cast-off material glow.—Hubble image, NASA Space Center Two years ago, the Darkness descended. I know this, because I wrote Melancholia about it, a post for FU (it’s not an insult, it’s a fashion blog). Since then, my heart has not so much been broken or burned but atomized. Completely shattered into raw matter. Boom. When it first started, I remember begging my brain for an answer, repeating over and over, if only in my mind: “What is happening to me?” “What is happening to me?” “What is happening to me?” That then turned into: “Why is this happening to me? Why me? Why?” That …