People pass through our lives and change us, tilting our orbit with their own. Sometimes, if the common gravitational center is strong enough, they return, they stay. Sometimes they travel on. But they change us all the same.

The great consolation of the cosmic order is the constancy of its laws, indiscriminate across the immensity of space, unchanged since the beginning of time. That we can predict an eclipse centuries into the future with precision down to the second but not the outcome of an election, that we can foretell the return of a comet but not the return of a friend, is a strange oasis of sanity amid the chaotic uncertainty of life. It is also a mirror — we see ourselves reflected in universe, covet its organizing principles for the chaos of our own lives.

In this respect, comets — the most erratic of cosmic denizens, with their irregular orbits, fickle periodicity, and mysterious origins in the outermost reaches of space — offer a singular lens on human relationships, that most unpredictable phenomenon in the universe.

Korean musician Lee Juck and artist Lee Jinhee take up these deep and often heavy questions with great levity and loveliness in Comet & Star (public library) — the story of a little star whose cosmic loneliness is interrupted by a visit from humanity’s most beloved comet: Halley’s comet, which has inspired poems and auguries. (“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835,” a grown man wrote in his 1909 autobiography. “It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.” And so he did — Halley’s comet, which blazes across Earth’s skies once every 76 years, was visible on November 30, 1835, when Samuel Clemens was born, and again on April 21, 1910, when he died as Mark Twain.)

As the comet passes, the little star calls out timorously, “Will you… be my friend?” But the comet blazes past.

Loneliness descends again, grey and dim — 76 years of it (which is but a blink in the life of a star, but it is also eternity to wait even a day for a loved one who has left).

And then, to the star’s great and glad surprise, the comet returns, this time ready to connect.

In the fleeting encounter, a beautiful friendship comes aglow. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe memorably wrote — but there is also, if you are lucky enough and openhearted enough, that rare miracle of knowing another only a short time yet seeing their naked soul, seeing yourself seen and deeply cherished in their eyes.

And so, when the comet leaves again to complete its next orbit, the star is no longer lonely — there is deep consolation in the knowledge that the cherished friend will always return, long though the stretches of absence may be; there is singular solace in the understanding that leaving need not be abandonment, that time and space avail not in any true bond, which nothing but indifference can break. (“Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good,” Simone Weil wrote to a faraway friend. “Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated.”)

The star and the comet
each glowed with joy
because they knew
they would meet again.
And they both shone
brighter than ever
in our vast universe.

Complement Comet & Star with the story of the comet behind Earth’s most transcendent celestial spectacle (which might one day destroy us) and these wonder-smiting medieval paintings of comets, then revisit Big Wolf & Little Wolf — another tender illustrated parable about loneliness and how friendship transforms us, which remains one of my favorite books of all time.

Illustrations courtesy of Enchanted Lion Books; photographs by Maria Popova