Orbital Resonance
In celestial mechanics, orbital resonance occurs when two bodies exert gravitational influence on each other, following a predictable pattern, but do not collide. This has been likened to harmony in music—notes held apart by a space.
10.
You danced into me at the goth club. You apologized as if it weren’t fate. I thought: “Maybe this time?” At a party I painted a tree onto your body, my brush navigating the contours of your bikini: a sturdy oak with sky-reaching branches. You say: “I’ve never been metaphysical. I don’t believe in past lives.” I mailed you a ring, a simple gold circle, when I heard you’d said yes to him. I was giving you a chance, though I knew better. What is left for me to do?
9.
It was a time of progress, a lindy hop forward. You were a country girl in the city, a different one. I played saxophone at a jazz club. You wore a dress meant to make you appear boyish and flat, as was the style. But I saw you. In any guise I have always seen you. My breath alchemized into music. It moved you, my music. When the gin drooped your lids drowsy, you left. We never spoke.
8.
I have always known you would make a good mother. The priest’s life-hardened face, crowned with quetzal feathers, on his holy skin a cracked mixture of indigo and clay. His raised hand signified approval from gods he believed were real. An innocent. You screamed as the bundle fell into the cenote, a sacred sinkhole. I wept, powerless and mute. The priest had wanted to make it rain.
7.
We had no way of knowing why the sky burned each night: scorch of orange, sear of pink, ache of twilight encroaching in glittering cobalt. I had returned from a hunt, sweating and alive. We looked up. The wind wisped our ragged hair. Someday humans would invent art. At the time we could only feel.
6.
Grunt-speak. Crude comfort-seek. A troop, gathering fruit. Then—chaos, crack in the sky, downpour. I lost you. I found shelter, alone. In my brain a wordless lament: You are not my mate. You are not my mate.
5.
I flashed my colors for you. Ta-da! Scales once grass green now flame red. Regard, my robust health. Consider, our future offspring. Hope in each flicker from every femoral pore. A language of: “Maybe? Maybe?” When you passed me by, a softer language of: “Maybe next time?”
4.
We knifed through the same translucent blue gel. There you are—in a wave of algal fronds, light shimmers. No, there you are—in a pocket of dark, hiding. I breathed through slittal gills, not knowing one day my breath will affect you, will make you sway. There you are—one of many, a wall of otherwise same but I found you, I always find you.
3.
We were surviving. We were figuring it out. Anaerobic prokaryotes. In our hydrothermal vent, on a seafloor belching gases, we gobbled minerals. Fighters. We would make it out alive. We would make it to whatever was beyond that. Our lives were: consume, mouth to energy source, but—someday we’d find life in sunlight.
2.
Wave. Wave. Moon-pull. Churn. I chase you, a disturbance. Certain specific molecules. We tumble and slosh around the planet, again and again, spin. I feel closest to you here. Someday you’ll tell me the element you relate to most is water. Perhaps this is why—this harmony, this watery braid of persistent movement. Wave, wave. You go, I go. Parallel as always.
1.
In that BOOM-explosive seismic flash of heat and light at the beginning of time at the beginning of all things I felt a love so nuclear and pure it could birth everything, all colors all galaxies all dimensions all souls, but most of all you, your atoms, your consciousness, your discreteness, your unique symbiotic fittingness to me, both of us in the mix and soon to be assembled, to live lives of greater complexity and sophistication. Our paths have yet to almost touch, in that goth club, in that time when we have bodies that want and language to speak it. You have yet to use that language to tell me no. But in that life-burst, in that love-birth, I know this, and it’s everything: No matter the outcome, mate or afar, my orbit is aligned with you, every heartbeat, every willful iridescence of scale, every wave, in every era, every time.
Christie Chapman
Christie Chapman is a writer and mom in Springfield, VA. Her work has been published and is forthcoming in Electric Literature, The Lascaux Review, Ghost Parachute, The Bulb Region, Flash the Court, Does It Have Pockets, and elsewhere, and was nominated for the Best Microfiction anthology.