A Sun's Eye View

 Winter,
said the sun,
Gazing through the snow-pocked cloudscape which hid Britain.
 It comes and goes,
he reflected.
 It all comes and goes.
Only he,
In his fiery indestructible brilliance,
Had lingered for long enough to remember when there was no winter on Earth,
When there was no Britain.
He reflected, as he sent out another of his flares,
another glowing stream of red hot particles,
On the other stars he had watched burn out and fade away on his travels.
One day, he suspected, he would do the same.
He suspected this, but somehow could never quite believe it with his whole self.
He remembered dimly the days when he had been a young star,
These memories merging nebulously with recollections of a time when he had been huge and wispy,
More felt than remembered.
He had watched as clouds and dust which he had once thought of as part of himself imploded on themselves
Slowly
slowly
Making the little balls on which his attention was now mostly focused.
The most beautiful of these balls, he thought, was probably Jupiter,
With its obedient array of tiny moons.
Sometimes he would spend whole years,
As the other planets zipped around him,
Watching the gaseous eddies on its surface,
Swirling around and around in a chaotic hypnotising waltz.
He remembered when the planet’s red spot first started to appear,
One more eddy in the sea,
But gradually he became aware that this eddy looked like staying for longer than any before it.
 Still,
He thought,
 Won’t be long now.
 Just another eddy,
 Another small spiral in a long history of small and short-lived spirals.
 Won’t be long now.
Sometimes the sun turns his attention to the smaller planets.
He has yet to see anything of any interest  on any of these planets
Last as long as Jupiter’s red spot,
But sometimes he is surprised.
Perhaps their time will come yet.
If he looks very, very closely at one of the smaller planets,
A watery one with a moon almost half its size,
He thinks he can see little grey structures which seem to be growing.
He wonders what causes these;
They seem strikingly unlike anything he has seen before on any of the other planets.
Sometimes he sees a faint glow coming from one or other of these grey spots,
And wonders if perhaps they are caused by some unusual form of volcanic activity.
He never gets a chance to see what these little spots look like when they are not lit up by his own brilliant glow, and so he has no idea that when they are hidden from his view the spots glow themselves with a fury unknown on the light side of the planet in many thousands of its orbits.
He will most likely never know about these lights.
More interesting still, though, are the dozens of tiny, tiny, tiny structures which have started appearing in the planet’s orbit very recently.
He has known satellites to detach themselves from planets before, but usually this is a very rare event.
These new satellites seem to be detaching themselves from Earth quicker than it takes that planet to make a full orbit around him.
Something interesting, he has decided, is happening on Earth.
He wonders how long it will last, as the little planet’s tiny moon makes one more of its revolutions.
 Not,
he guesses,
 As long as the spot on Jupiter.