A poem based on Tincture by A.Gibson
Imagine:When a friendship leaves,
the heart moves through the universe
trying to explain what has been lost.
It begins with the smallest things:
It tells the stars about a laugh—
how it could arrive suddenly,
fill a room,
bend the air around it the way gravity bends light.
The stars answer first:
We burn for billions of years, they say,
but we have never known joy between two friends like that.
The universe asks again.
So the heart keeps explaining:
There were concerts—
standing shoulder to shoulder
while music lifted an entire crowd.Chappell, Hootie, with many in years to come.
The lights rising over the WalmartAmp.
The moment when the first song started
and the night felt bigger than itself as we screamed like school girls mad for our celebrity crush.
The comets streak past and listen.
We cross entire skies, they say,
but we have never seen two people
hold concert excitement like that.
The universe asks again.
So the heart tells them about brunches.
Coffee cooling on the table
while conversations wandered everywhere
from ridiculous stories to impossible questions:
How was Egypt? You shocked me when we first hugged, the first moment. What does that mean?More depth:
Life after death.
The shape of the universe.
Whether love bends time the way gravity bends space.
The nebulae drift closer.
We make stars from dust, they say,
but we have never made a conversation come that alive.
The universe asks again.
So the heart tells them about late nights.
Bars where laughter bounced off the walls
like light looking for somewhere to land.
Plans scribbled into the future in a list a mile long and Marcos saying we both couldn’t wait for me to move to do so many things with, go on vacations we were sure we would take,
little local adventures waiting for us
just down the road.
The rays of light travel billions of miles
before answering.
We cross galaxies, they say,
but we have never watched humans
build futures out of ordinary days.
The universe asks again.
So the heart tells them about a movie.
Two people sitting in the dark
watching Interstellar
and arguing about time,
about black holes,
about whether love might travel
across impossible distance.We both know it does. We feel it every day from the people we have lost but not really lost.
The stars grow quiet.
No comet,
no nebula,
no wandering ray of light
has ever understood this before.
The heart tries one more time.
It says:
Two lives can orbit each other for a while.
They can share music
and mornings and evenings
and questions about the universe.
They can laugh so easily
the world briefly feels correct.
Then one day
one of them leaves the orbit.
Silence. So much silence like a vacuum of space.
And suddenly
the sky is different.
The universe listens carefully now.
Tell us again, the stars say,
about the laugh.
Tell us again about concerts.
Tell us again about brunch tables
and bars and the movie about space.
Tell us again
about the person
who made the universe feel
briefly understandable.
And the heart keeps answering.
Because somewhere in this vast universe
there is still a laugh, her heart,
it and I would recognize. . .
anywhere.
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