同心一体 • All for One
It was only during an initiation of sorts last year that I started to really take note of how interpersonal relationships are subject to a similar sort of gravity as cosmic bodies. Connections, threads, wax and wane in rotation with one another. People grow closer and farther apart in orbit; some longer and wider, the friends you only talk to every few months, years, or lifetimes; some shorter and narrower until they slingshot each other into space, never to be seen again. Sometimes they even crash into each other. Sometimes they explode.
But/and/also to an extent like cosmic bodies, some relationships become harder to see and hear through the distance. Unlike space, though, this isn't due to the silence of the vacuum, but the opposite, the exponential increase in digital noise that has become the internet. It used to be so easy to stalk your friends when the internet was smaller, more intimate, when you knew the kinds of places your friends would seek refuge and the names they would use. Now there's so much it's impossible to discern. The anonymity is easier, at least in spaces that don't require an ID in order to prove yourself - but then, so is everyone's. You could lose an entire planet in that sea of slop.
It's rough. Perhaps naïvely, when I enter into relationship with someone - when I choose to put myself in orbit around them - it is typically not lightly. With every friend I have ever made and grown close to, every intimate relationship, there is a point where I think that we'll be this connected forever. Once the orbit is there, once the satellites are established, it feels like they've been there forever, and I stop wondering where they had been all that time, and I take for granted that the dance we do is so close and so perfect that there is no longer - was never - a gap for them to fill.
And then, as stars and people are want to do, something drifts away - sometimes explodes - and the gap is reintroduced. It grows wider and wider, the silence between longer and longer.
At some point, the silence is all we have left.