Acceleration
Gravity makes stars and stars make life, but life can veer from the forces that make it.
On the train, I learned that the laws of motion are what they are so that we can love on each other despite their fundamental ways.
He came in through the door in front of me, slightly to my left, walking through the crowd with an edge, his dark clothes matching his skin. I noticed the silver hanging from his outfit in the brief flash of time I had to take him in before he sat down next to me.
As the train moved, I felt his body lean towards mine—the gravitational field shifted in my favor. But I too gave in to the laws of gravity, and I leaned away from him in exactly the same proportion, and we remained inches apart for some time. With each shudder and grind of the tracks, I’d drift away from him precisely as much as he’d drift towards me. I found myself wishing for a moment where gravity-as-acceleration would make an exception to its universal rule.
Eventually, my shoulder was on his, solidly, and it felt really good—and I know he enjoyed it too. We just didn’t say anything to each other because it was the shame not even of being gay but of being alive that kept us apart—and that we just preferred to leave it all dizzy. The whole rest of the way was like that. I managed to pluck up the courage to look at his face, while his shoulder leaned on mine, only after I felt his guard was down from nodding off. I’d peek slowly at first, through the corner of my eye, and then with my full gaze, finding his head slightly leaning towards mine, eyes closed, blaring music from wired earbuds, his mind someplace else.
When we got to my stop, he stood up before I did, dropping his phone in the process of walking out the same door he marched through on his way next to me. The earth sucked his phone down in an arc of time towards itself. He kissed his teeth as I bent over and picked his phone up and handed it to him, looking at him with the slightest smile, my hand a silver platter, his eyes a searching, living thing. He silently radiated this double bass pluck of appreciation and grabbed it, and turned around and walked away.
Surely he must also be headed to the same film festival, I thought as I joined the crowd following him up the steps. When I got up to the street, the sunlight broke into my eyes: yellow cabs zipping by, the city—restless and pretty as ever—and his disappearance into its maze. I adjusted to the light, made sense of where I was, and found my way.
You ever feel like the universe is nudging you?