The Orbit Where You Almost Touched Me

A brief history of almost-touching: on longing, inertia, and the astrophysics of unspeakable ache.

Photo by Guillermo Ferla on Unsplash

They didn’t sign up for trajectory.
Nobody handed them a clipboard
and said please initial here if you consent
to being bound by ellipticals
and the crushing etiquette of stars.

But they moved anyway
two fire cracked loners,
each blistered by a different kind of silence.

She: the shape of a thought
before it became polite.
Heat with teeth.
A theory so new it made the chalk tremble.
The kind of motion that gives telescopes vertigo.

She knew things,
not because someone told her,
but because her nervous system predated speech
and remembered everything that wasn’t supposed to be archived.
The secrets in the floorboards.
The grief behind someone’s “fine.”
The pitch of a voice when the soul starts leaking.

She didn’t orbit.
She erratically bloomed
one part prophecy,
three parts flight instinct braided into an apology.
There wasn’t a word for it.
Closest thing was reverence,
but even that felt too sterile,
too Hallmark.

She never asked to be made of antennae.
But there she was,
picking up the static between everyone else’s silences.
She called it intuition,
but only because saying “clairvoyance”
got her side-eyed at brunch.

Her body was a barometer.
Her chest hummed when others lied.
She didn’t cry during death,
but wept during commercials
because no one else knew
how to metabolize tenderness without irony.

She did not float.
She stayed.
Until staying looked too much like disappearing.
Then she unhooked herself from the narrative
and called it grace.
But it felt like exodus.

He: slow-burning skepticism,
the flicker of scripture
held too close to someone’s shame.
a loop that wanted a destination
but settled for inertia.

His orbit held gravity,
a kind that did not announce itself
but pressed its weight
in the softest places
eye contact,
shared silence,
his hand hovering near yours
like it knew reaching was too obvious.

He believed in the unsayable.
In the usefulness of restraint.
Not out of fear,
but out of reverence.
He understood that speaking too soon
can flatten a sacred thing.
That sometimes,
to feel fully,
you have to stay a little outside it
not to avoid,
but to preserve.

Still,
he carried the ache.
A hum in his sternum
that said love might undo him
if it ever truly landed.
So, he built constellations from glances.
He journaled in metaphors
no one else would read.
He learned patience
the way most people learn defense.
And he stayed there
a quiet sky,
hoping someone might see
he was never cold,
just cloud covered.

His orbit wasn’t futility.
It was geometry rewritten out of caution.
A loop, yes,
but one he walked willingly
because he’d rather circle than crash.
He knew the gravity of connection.
It’s why he resisted.
He wasn’t afraid of love.
He was afraid of what it might see.

And what if it didn’t flinch?

Worse,
what if it did?

They didn’t fall in ‘love’.
That would have required gravity
they could name.
Instead, they flirted with impact
in the way that certain books
almost fall off shelves
when you breathe near them.

Saturn didn’t notice.
Jupiter blinked.
Even god, if she was watching,
pretended to adjust the radio.

They weren’t kin.
Weren’t myth.
Weren’t antonyms in a sentence
that someone forgot to finish.
They were the parenthetical in the equation.
They were what didn’t compute
but refused to leave.

She nicknamed him almost.
He called her aftermath.
Neither flinched.
You don’t when you’ve already
been born inside out.

They brushed once, twice, maybe three times.
A cosmic graze.
Like lovers in a dream
you wake up remembering
but can’t swear happened.
And it was enough
to rearrange a thousand atmospheres.

Their bodies kept moving,
as required.
But somewhere, in a throat shaped pocket
of space,
an echo formed
that didn’t know what to do
without someone to catch it.

And the humans
the humans never knew why
their hearts pulsed
like error codes
in the checkout line at CVS.

It wasn’t love.
It wasn’t even memory,
not the kind you can pull apart
without shattering.
It was plasma writing its autobiography
on the wall of a cave
no one thought to light.

And when they vanished
as comets do,
with all the flair of gods
and none of the follow through
they left a question
lodged in the spine of the galaxy.

Not why.
Not who.
Just a soft, unanswered:
what if?

And somewhere in the dark,
Gaia rolls over.
Sighs.
And pretends not to notice.