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Asteroid B-612

Noah Park

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So tell me, is there room on your small planet
For someone who is learning to be known?
I’ve been standing on the outside of the atmosphere
But I think I’m ready now to come home

Tell me, is there room?

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I wrote a K-pop novel with a song in it. Then I made the song real.

“Asteroid B-612” lives on page 289 of A Star Keeps Its Distance, written by a character named Noah Park in a practice room when he was twenty. The title comes from The Little Prince. The bridge contains a Korean word — in-yeon — which means all the lives it took to arrive at this one meeting.

I gave the lyrics to an AI music generator and told it: K-pop R&B, deep male vocal, the kind of voice that sounds like someone working something out rather than performing. What came back was not the song in my head. It could not be. But it was close enough to feel like recognition.

For Namjoon, and for BTS —
who made music a place to go
when the world outside was too much.

From A Star Keeps Its Distance — Lakshmi Iyer

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