Instructions for Falling Into a Black Hole

Deeya Sabnani’s poetic (and practical) guide to falling in love with someone destructive.

1. Locate a singularity.

This part is easier than the textbooks suggest; they rarely look like catastrophes at first.

They might look like charm, like quiet confidence, or someone who says your name

as if they’ve already decided what it means.

You do not ask about the density. You do not ask what collapsed to make them this way.

Origins are for people who plan on keeping their distance, but you’ll soon start to realise you can’t.

2. Stand closer than is reasonable.

There will be a distance at which everything still makes sense; stand just beyond it.

Ignore the small calculations your mind performs in the background—the subtle unease, the asymmetry, the way conversations curve slightly in their direction as if pulled by an unseen force. Nothing dramatic, just minor distortions in the field. Your attention follows similar trajectories, lingering past its usual threshold, returning without clear cause. There’s a faint but persistent sense of recalibration, like your internal coordinates are being adjusted in real time, subtly aligning you to their centre of mass.

Don’t call it imbalance. Call it intrigue, or maybe chemistry. Give it any name that makes it feel

intentional rather than inevitable.

3. Rebrand the warning signs.

This is essential.

When intensity becomes passion, inconsistency becomes depth.

Silence becomes a mystery. Cruelty, if properly lit, becomes honesty.

You will need to be creative here, and you will need to lie, but luckily only to yourself.

For moments that should make you step back, you’ll rotate them gently in your hands, like fragments of light bent through a lens, adjusting the angle until they refract into something softer, something almost beautiful. What once looked like a warning begins to resemble a pattern, something intentional, something meant for you.

4. Begin orbit.

At this stage, escape is still technically possible.

You will circle them, adjusting your trajectory, looping your behaviour. You’ll tell yourself this is

connection, that this is what it means to understand someone. Annoyingly, understanding usually moves both ways. This only pulls.

5. Notice the distortion of time.

Time won’t behave properly anymore. It stretches in the wrong places, collapses in others. A message takes seconds to read and hours, even days, to arrive. Somehow that becomes normal. You start measuring your life in intervals: before them, after them, the space between their attention.

You will tell yourself this is what anticipation feels like.

Do not make the mistake of calling it what it is: dependence under the influence of gravity.

6. Approach the event horizon.

There is a moment where leaving becomes harder than staying. There’s no ceremony for this, no clear threshold you can point to later and say, “there, that’s where it happened.” Just a quiet realisation that your thoughts no longer belong entirely to you. By the time you understand it, you’re already past it. You crossed it gently, willingly, almost tenderly.

7. Lose the outside.

From here, nothing escapes: not light, not information, not the version of you that existed before the crossing. There is no signal you can send back to explain what this feels like, no language that survives the conditions intact. Things people say will only appear distantly, as if through static.

So when you do hear things, you will translate them to fit this horizon. “This isn’t good for you” becomes “they don’t understand.” “You’re changing” becomes “this is what growth feels like.”

8. Stretch.

There’s a term for this, technically. Spaghettification.

It sounds almost funny, which is unfortunate. Because what it means is this: you begin to lengthen in some places and thin out in others. Your patience expands, your tolerance deepens, and you excuse things you once wouldn’t have. Meanwhile, something quieter compresses. Your boundaries, maybe. Your sense of proportion. Small, essential things that don’t announce their disappearance. Don’t name it or think too hard about it.

9. Watch the light disappear.

Not all at once. That would be too obvious.

Just a dimming. Music doesn’t land the same way. The things that used to hold your attention start to feel like placeholders, ways to pass time until something more important happens. You won’t say you’ve lost anything. You’ll say you’ve prioritised.

10. Attempt meaning-making.

At some point, you will try to understand; why this? Why them? Why does the centre feel like it matters? You may conclude that there is something profound here, something rare, something cosmic, something destined.

This is a common error. Human beings have always mistaken overwhelming forces for meaningful ones.

11. Accept the singularity.

You try to approach the centre, but there isn’t one you can see. That’s the problem. All you have is the idea of it. The belief that if you get close enough, everything will finally make sense, that all this distortion leads somewhere, resolves into something solid. So you move toward it anyway, letting yourself be pulled in.

12. Remain.

This is the final step, though it will not feel final. There is no explosion, no cinematic ending.

Just an endless inward movement toward something that does not expand to meet you.

From the outside—if there is still an outside—you would appear to slow. To hover. To freeze at the edge, suspended in a final, stretched-out version of yourself. But that is only an illusion produced by distance. From where you are, there is no stillness, only acceleration. You will not leave the same. You will not, in any meaningful sense, leave at all.

13. Call it love.

Most people do. It makes the whole thing easier to explain.

by Deeya Sabnani