Flat, they say

I went down a rabbit hole tonight. Not about you. Well, not initially. 

Scientists say the universe is flat.

Not paper-flat.

Not small.

Flat like

parallel lines that never meet again.

Flat like something that goes on forever

without bending back to where it started.

They say it’s expanding.

Everything moving away from everything else.

Galaxies slipping farther apart.

I won’t lose sleep over that.But scientists will.It only makes me wonder about the universeAnd miss you more and more.

How something can be

so vast,

so infinite,

and still feel

so lonely.
Just like my heart my life is lonely without you in it now. Without our conversations about things like this.Don’t you miss them too?

Scientists don’t know if it wraps around.

If somewhere, far beyond what we can measure, it curves

and returns you

to the place you began.

They don’t know if it’s endless

or just so large we’ll never reach the edge.

That’s what keeps them up at night.

And this is what keeps me up:

Were we flat?

Parallel lines,

close once,

never touching again?

Or were we something curved,

something that would have found its way

back if you had just stayed in orbit a little longer?

The stars we see are already dead.

Their light just hasn’t gotten the message yet.

I think about that too.

How what we had

might still be traveling through me,

even if you’ve already decided

it ended.Was our friendship dead from the beginning? Did I miss the signs like old celestial light? 

They say the universe has no center.

No single place everything revolves around.

But you were for a while.

And I’d have made your world mine. You knew that. 

But you left me and then left me again as your fucking friend. I will never accept or let distance grow

without collapsing in on myself.I never lost myself. But I did lose you.

They measure background radiation to understand the beginning of everything.

I measure silence.I haven’t seen you in over a year. Heard your voice. Heard a kind word from any of your texts. They’re all cold as the bay waters. 

I measure the space between the last “hey, it’s me”

and whatever this is now.

Flat, they say,

Almost perfectly flat.

If there is curvature,

it’s so slight we can’t detect it yet.

Maybe that’s us.

Maybe somewhere

beyond what I can see,

there’s a bend I just haven’t reached.

Or maybe—

some universes

expand forever,

and the bravest thing I can do

is stop waiting

for them to come back around.

But sometimes

in the part of the night

where the sky feels infinite

and merciless and holy,

I let myself imagine

No, believe, that you do.You will.I also believe you will.

Not as a collision.

Not as a catastrophe.

But as true as gravity.

As something subtle and inevitable,

a slow arc bending toward what it once knew.

I imagine you waking up to empathy and kindness and with the quiet understanding

That you can leave my orbit But still feel my gravity. That You can drift light years And still feel a pull to do the right thing, which was never THIS.That you can build a new skyBut my star is still alive. That not everything or everyone you leave is irreplaceable. 

I imagine you tracing the map backward,

following the faint background radiation

of us—

and choosing

to curveChoosing to come back around.

And if the universe is truly flat,

if parallel lines never meet again—

then fuck… let this be the one place

the math is wrong.