On the night of the new moon, when the sky holds only stars and darkness, you prepare a bath that mirrors the cosmos. Fill the tub with water dyed midnight blue or deep purple—bath bombs that turn the water the color of space itself, a color that looks infinite. Add biodegradable gold glitter, watching it swirl and settle like galaxies forming in a backdrop of space. The bathroom becomes a temple: a skylight revealing the stars overhead, candles arranged around the tub’s edge, their flames reflected in the dark water, incense burning—something earthy and ancient, frankincense or sandalwood—smoke curling upward like nebulae.

You and your partner enter the water naked, feeling the glitter cling to your skin, tiny particles of gold catching the candlelight. You are covered in stars before the ritual even begins. The water is hot enough to make you both breathe out heavily, to soften your bodies, to make you feel weightless and warm.

You’ve prepared three passages each—poetry about the stars, prose about humanity’s cosmic origins, about the fact that the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones were forged in the hearts of dying stars billions of years ago. You are not separate from the universe. You are the universe experiencing itself.

The first passage is read aloud by one of you, voice steady and reverent. Words about supernovas and the scattering of elements across space, about how every atom in your body traveled across light-years to become you. When the passage ends, you scoop a light handful of purple glitter and blow it gently into your partner’s face. The glitter catches in their wet hair, clings to their cheeks, settles on their eyelashes. They close their eyes and smile. You light a new candle together, the flame joining the others.

Your partner reads the second passage—a reading about how we are made of stardust, how looking at each other is looking at the cosmos made flesh. They blow gold glitter into your face, and you feel the particles land on your lips, your forehead, your shoulders. Another candle lit. The ritual continues.

By the sixth passage, you are both covered in glitter—gold and purple mixing on your skin, in your hair, across your collarbones. The water has become a swirling galaxy, and you are celestial bodies floating in it. The final candle is lit, and the bathroom glows with ten flames now, the light dancing across the dark water and your glittering skin.

Then the ritual softens. You move closer, your bodies slick with water and stardust. You massage each other’s shoulders, releasing tension, grounding each other in the body even as the ritual has lifted you into the cosmic. You turn on the bath jets, and the water churns around you, glitter swirling in currents. You wash each other’s hair—shampoo worked gently through strands thick with glitter, your fingers massaging their scalp. You gently care for each other’s bodies.

When you finally step out of the bath, you sit together in front of a mirror, still dripping, still covered in glitter that refuses to fully wash away. You look at yourselves—two people made of stars, shimmering and alive. You pour two glasses of sparkling champagne, the bubbles rising like tiny galaxies in the flutes. You toast to the night, to each other, to the improbable miracle of being alive at the same time in the same universe. Then you each make one promise. A commitment spoken while covered in stardust, while the candles still burn, while the new moon holds space for new beginnings.

The glitter will take days to fully disappear from your skin, from your hair, from the bathroom tiles. You’ll find it in unexpected places for weeks—a fleck of gold on your pillowcase, purple shimmer on your wrist. Each time you notice it, you’ll remember: you are made of stars, and you bathed in that beautiful truth together.