Falling in Love Can Make You Sick

ISSUE #124

There is one essential force which keeps us moving through space, though it goes by different names and different theories. Newton framed it as what is between every thing which attracts another thing, the product of their masses and the differences between them. Einstein figured mass and its reservoir of energy were pressing on the fabric which is woven space and time, or that which comprises being and that which pulls upon it.

Does gravity suggest that the energy of being can bend both space and time? And what is love if not an energy which presses on the cloth of other minds? The concepts are simple with only two bodies, growing only more complex as more shimmer into view. Those with the most mass will always pull the hardest. Such is the nature of orbital mechanics—laws of attraction, physics of love. If the centers of all were perfect, we could stay in orbit forever, no matter how immaculate or wretched we were. Instead, we have our tiny entropies, our nuclear fusions and solar flares.

The Earth isn't spiraling toward the sun, it's being pushed away. Its solar winds are nudging us farther and farther into space. Add to this our own precession—the rotation of our own rotating body—and the point which once was closest to the sun becomes the farthest over time. (Dizzy? Me too). It's just as when a perfect spinning top begins to wobble, the head making a circle of its own. It happens when encountering the force of another—it can be as small as a wink or as abstract as a dream.

It's the nauseating quality of love—barely worth enduring at all, but who can help it? There's no getting off this ride. We swing to the same spot every year. If we gave form to time and stretched it, the Earth would look like a giant slinky. Spear a certain point and you dissect me every year. It's always the anniversary of something. It'd be easier to have no memory at all, as every flight into the future brings back something from the past.

When memories do come back to me, I shuffle them like cards, mixing good ones with the painful, hoping those get lost in the deck. Certain songs can play against me, counting cards to figure out exactly where my heart lies. I bet against them with chips of hope, heavier than any metal—but if they weigh me down and drown me, let it be in the deepest river and not a shallow pond.