There are a limited few who’ve left the hold of gravity, who’ve been jettisoned into the great abyss of space, and lived a separate lifetime away from the friction and resistance that complicates everything on the surface of terrestrial bodies. They’ve experienced a different existence. It is hard upon their return, to leave that behind. Often, there is a dizziness and a vertigo that makes it seem as if the planes of their existence are overlapping and the disorientation makes it difficult for them to situate themselves where they are. They cling to the familiar in the echoes of the other while trying to stabilize themselves.
The morning stubble feels different, now. It feels like absence, like the aftermath of a world ending, momentarily, as it may be. The memories swirl, moments flash, a montage of recollection. The night before. The evenings strung out in the constellation of experience woven through and between the lifetimes of this one. Their moments together fill in those spaces in between experiences and just outside the worlds they’ve constructed and which govern all that they can create. They are like the ghost whispers which call out continually but remain always like dreams. Always in between, that same liminal state where we escape to in our daydreams.
With the first rousing, the first stir of morning, its breeze carried in through the screen after a waltz with the blinds, there’s an ever brief moment of indecision, of hesitation, a moment filled with the desire to stretch the seconds, as well as the fear that to do so would disrupt all overlapping realities, would cause echoes to reverberate in such a way that equilibrium would be lost forever. They hold onto each other in that darkness, that moment before light breaks apart the shadows. But they know that those seconds only last so long.
And there are echoes throughout their days, and they reach out, text after text as if they were collaborating on some greater script. As if, perhaps, having found each other, there are lifetimes of conversations that they need to catch up on, reminding each other how since the discovery there is an emptiness that has made itself present when they are not together when the other is not there. But these are like interstellar transmissions sent in short bursts, in those moments stolen from the life and world which they know best, have known best, and which continues to be the most real.
As the day progresses, inevitably the interstellar dust, resistance, and its friction slow down the transmissions between them, the way erosion, often, clouds the surf. He feels the distance, of dimensions, of systems, or simply of planets and can’t help but wonder if their orbit will ever find confluence. The days stretch and it is these moments, the ones with interference, with friction, with resistance, that seem to have that magical quality of elasticity which permits them, though identical to all other similar units of time, to contain, at least, some multiple of duration. After so many years of searching, the desire is to cut out what seems to be the in-between, but the truth is, that it is, in fact, the in-between which they exist in; they, as an entanglement of their relationship between worlds, storylines, and threads of existence. There’s that little voice, always, that calls out, wondering, if the in-between that they are in will hold or be swallowed by the weight and responsibility of keeping a world spinning, even if it is one that is nothing more than severed nuclei.