Measured in Orbits

On Distance, Gravity, and the Quiet Architecture of Longing

Note of thanks:

With gratitude to @Pancakesushi, whose poem Cosmos opened a way of thinking about distance not as absence but as motion, order, and unseen binders. This piece is written in dialogue with that work, carried by its scale, its restraint, and its understanding that separation, like gravity, is always doing something.

Between us stretches a working distance,

not empty, not still,

a field where time gathers weight

and light learns how to curve.

Separation here is busy.

Solar tides adjust their breath,

comets stray and circle back,

their recklessness leaving script

across the dark,

proof that motion remembers.

Out of the unruly, order hums.

Crowned suns quietly insist,

drawing bodies into meaning,

not by command,

but by the patient grammar of pull.

We move within the same design.

A cosmic promenade unfolds

spirals turning like thoughts at night,

accretion fires tilted against sense,

faithful to laws that bend

but do not break.

What binds us does not speak.

Invisible skeins hold tension,

half-myth, half-measurement,

felt long before it is known.

This is not distance as loss.

It is distance as structure,

a dignity of space

where longing behaves like gravity:

silent, exact,

and always at work.