Gravity and Entropy Always Find One Another

“Knock at my door, please.”

The words trail on in my head repeatedly as I anxiously pace back and forth in an attempt to calm the surge of simmering energy within. I look up at the clock…

11:59.

“It’s late, he might not come,” I think to myself, trying to soothe myself.

“Knock on my door.”

The loop repeats and I grunt, forcing out the sound, hoping it’ll drown the nagging want that clings to life.

“Don’t come!” I say, denying myself as I habitually do, cradling my head in my palms.

Knock, knock, knock—called through the wooded barrier.

My head snaps back, eyes agape.

“Fuck,” I whisper to myself, elation and unreserved fear tugging my heart back and forth in a cage struggling to contain it.

Two years ago

I moved cities in July of 2024 and started fresh. Everything that brought comfort and assurance was replaced by a new thing that brought new sensations. The smell of streets, buildings, cafés—scenes of the average family unit in public, of couples exchanging body language unused to me—always possessing something suspiciously new for my brain to chew on, note, question and familiarize itself with. Most people can relate to feeling alien, but some circumstances excel at making this imagined reality less ambiguous and this was one of them.

Starting a new job certainly didn’t help the anxiety, but the excitement and child-like wonder that accompanied the newness of it all buzzed synchronously alongside the disquiet—chemically bonding them. I lived in a heightened state that shifted my attention from one thing to the next, always alert and switched on, so perhaps when I saw you, not even a blip flashed from my radar. But you would continue to orbit me, long enough for me to feel that pull that wraps one body into the orbit of another.

It was fascination, that was the beginning of it. We didn't speak much. When I first met him, he was in the corner of the room, silently observing everything from the outside. I couldn’t figure out what his role was. Everyone participated except him and like I said, not even a blip on my radar. He had introduced himself and he was nice enough, but at that point I was so overwhelmed. I was having trouble recognising the person I’d become; I wasn’t in any way ready to recognise someone else as anything more than another source of confusion.

But we’d work together and at a pace comfortable to both of us we began to get to know each other—and that was at a snail's pace. Or it seemed that way to me. I don’t think I realised how enthralled all that time ago until recently. He made me inquisitive. It wasn’t all-consuming, it was a diversion that grew into something more incurable.

“How long have you lived in this city?” he asked, attentively observing me with this intense stare that pinned you and made you feel as though you were on trial.

“I just moved here. About 4 months,” I said, trying to seem unaffected by his manner.

“Not long at all. Why did you decide to move?” he asked, crossing his arms and leaning against the corridor wall opposite me, pinning me with yet another look of intrigue as if to say, tell me more.

“I needed a change. I got this job and I thought, ‘Here’s my opportunity to invent a crisis for myself,’ and here I am.” I said, trying to appear nonchalant; something about him made me want to fix my posture and stand up straighter.

“Here you are.” He said with a gentle smile that softened his features and made imagining his softer side more accessible.

“And what do you do when you’re not inventing crises for yourself?” he said, squinting his eyes slightly like a detective on duty.

“I enjoy reading, I guess. I study physics and other sciences to entertain myself,” I say, unsure of how much to reveal about myself.

“Physics, really?” he says, immediately more animated than I’d ever seen him.

“Why physics?” he asked.

“Because it’s helpful to know that a system made up of such harsh variables also has laws.

The scariest things are things that can’t be explained. They’re ghosts with a potential to hurt you at any moment until you understand it. Maybe that’s what the universe felt like to me.

There’s also the fact that outer space, despite its laws, is vast enough to create the sensation of freedom. To feel like you’re falling when you know you’re not is an exquisite compromise.

And then again, I’ve always hated the feeling of falling so perhaps it makes sense that I’d try to arrange everything in view and beyond into a handlebar. Something scalable.”

…is what I wished I’d said.

But instead I said “Because I appreciate the challenge of it. It really puts things into perspective.” clammed up and afraid of the part of me I hadn’t yet mastered.

We continued speaking on the subject for a while longer. He told me that he believed in panspermia, which is the theory that suggests all life on earth was seeded from extraterrestrial bodies, like asteroids. It was the first time I heard someone communicate an idea on the fly that I didn’t entirely disagree with. He was forthcoming and honest and that was strangely disarming. I think I began to see some of myself in him—but the part I was estranged from—and not being able to rely on her, I shied away from being equally as honest.

“What do you do in your free time?” I asked, realising I forgot to ask when we were on the subject.

“I direct sci-fi movies.” He said it with a straight face and of course I was intrigued.

“You do?” I remarked, clearly a little taken by surprise.

“Yeah,” he said, raising both his brows as if to say, "It's really not that crazy, " as he passed me his phone. I watched a trailer for his latest project. When I had the chance again I watched some of his films. They’d earned him a lot of public attention and I slowly began to realise that his accomplishments were recognised. He wasn’t just passing on a hobby; he was realising his dreams, running towards himself unabashedly.

We began meeting like that, once a week, every week, during our break. We’d talk for a time about whatever came up that evening. He’d told me about all the major changes happening in his life, about all the progress and chaos and excitement. And when he said that I was a palm tree through it all, I believed him because the more we spoke the more I became reliant on the challenge his company offered and I wanted to believe it meant that much to him too. I felt like I failed at every attempt to reveal myself to him, and because I felt like I should return his candidness with my own, talking to him motivated me to begin investigating the internal conflict I was having. That was my slow ascent into a type of madness. I was grateful for the solid ground he provided while I floundered about the ether and as I emerged from that other place and we continued to meet that image of me beside him grew increasingly vivid.

We went on a business trip to Hokkaido after Christmas and a few of us decided to make the most of it by staying for a while longer to see through the new year. We dined out on our last night there to celebrate. The snow blanketed the trees and cars with a thick layer of white and the wind sang howling songs in appreciation while inside we sat comfortably distanced from it all. He sat across from me, challenging me to try foods I’d never really liked and I let it slip—

“It has the texture of what I imagine an eyeball would,” I say after taking a bite out of the meaty fungus.

“Yeah, it kind of looks like one too,” he says, turning it over. I observe the gills and the cut stem to look like an iris and a pupil.

“Yeah,” I nodded my head.

“I completed another new project recently. Want to see?”

Slightly distracted by my next bite, so proud of the fact that I didn’t end up gagging at the texture, I said—preoccupied and vulnerable—“I love seeing what you create.” With a gushing, love-sick warmth that we both notice like a bolt striking—the surprise and earnest fear on my face bringing the silence to life as it rolls like scattered pearls, clattering to the floor—and by the end it’s clear as day on both our faces.

I tried to leave as soon as I could. I’d begun a series of chastising inner dialogues that was ripping through my composure and all I wanted to do was hide from the uncertainty of what came next. And that’s when it happened.

Knock, knock, knock…

I opened the door and every bit of uncertainty and fear dissolved to leave only him, a clear blue sky I could look up to.

The clock struck 12:30.

Sitting face to face now, we smiled at each other in flickers of surreal wonder, pauses stretching between us as we finally began to spill the trove of secrets we’d kept—little shields we’d built to spare ourselves from imagined pain that felt so far away now.

“When did things change?” he asked, his voice low, careful.

I breathed out slowly, softening, letting the last of my apprehension dissolve.

“If I’m being honest, I arrived in Japan smack dab in the center of a crisis. I wasn’t joking about that. I wasn’t challenged by anything back home. Of course, I wasn’t—simply finding a job was so hard. That process became a slow degeneration of will and faith. So I decided to come here and exchange one extreme for another. Back home I had no career and here I had no place. So when my brain switched to survival ‘get through the day’ simplicity, no alarms sounded. I’ve been disembodied, separated from the person I once knew this whole time, trying to find my way there again. I think I’m getting back there with your help. You challenged me to dream again and that’s where it seems I was hiding, in a dream of myself that I’d forgotten in the process of taking care of more urgent things.”

And so we continued. I confessed and so did he. We started the gentle process of threading our worlds together by revealing what made them so fragile - our need for connection, recognition and understanding - with yearning hanging on every word.

We came together on the precipice of a new year, kissed as it closed, and stepped into the next now, and the next now, and the next now—exploding forward into a series of unpredictable cosmic collisions, willing to gamble uncertainty for possibility.