Hover just beyond.

Space itself yawns wider

with each heartbeat of mine,

and I tumble, weightless,

into the hush between your pulses.

Oh how I learn the geometry of longing:

curved lines that never meet,

angles of emptiness that shape my knowing,

infinite laps around a vanishing point.

Still, I listen, for the ghost of your glow

for the hum of your absence

for the spark that says,

"I hover just beyond."

So let your light flirt with my edge,

stretching, teasing forever unconfined.

I will stand here, awed and unafraid,

and let the cosmos teach me how to wait.

Still, I listen, for the ghost of your glow

for the hum of your absence

for the spark that says,

"I hover just beyond."

——————————————————————————————————

I stand at the precipice of our event horizon, the curvature of spacetime itself bending away from me—away from us—as if mocking the very notion of connection. You flee me, not out of choice or purpose, but by the cosmic imperative of expansion itself. Each photon you once released, each faint flicker of warmth from your presence, travels across gulfs of space, threading through the tapestry of time like whispers from a beyond age. I catch them. Briefly. Those photons, those echoes... And in their gentle touch, I imagine you are still there, still smiling, still scolding me for overthinking, for my hubris in seeking permanence in a universe woven from entropy.

But the universe is not a lover that holds its breath for our love stories. It is a cold engine of indifferent unfolding, inflating like a smug balloon. The more I reach, the more you recede, your light stretched thin, red-shifted into silence. I think of the cosmic microwave background, the fossil glow of the universe's infancy—what is it but a memory of heat that once could have burned, but not only lingers as a static hum, soft as static in my ears, loud as loneliness in my chest.

Is it not absurd?

That my ignorance, my own ignorance, defines the very boundary of my knowing you. You slip behind that horizon, not because you vanish, but because my mind, my fragile, stubborn, carbon-laced mind, cannot chase the endlessness of you. The event horizon, then, is not some arbitrary wall, but a mirror for my own limitations. My own refusal to accept that the universe, in its vast and tireless exhalation, owes me nothing. Not your presence, not even the guarantee that you were ever there, with me.

And yet, in the hush that follows, I find neither triumph nor despair, but something far more curious. An amused exhalation at my own smallness. I picture your photons, those dim ambassadors of your existence, still striving towards me across an ever stretching wheel of becoming, as if to say. "Here I am, you can't catch me." Their teasing persistence is the universe's final jest. An insolent wink from a cosmic trickster who delights in revealing our limits.

I cradle that mockery like a talisman, for in it lies a tender truth: that to my own unknowing is to glimpse the shape of infinity. My ignorance is no prison but a spacehold, a sacred vacancy where wonder germinates. Beyond the horizon, you remain. An echo in the grand expanse. Proof that some lights are meant not to be held, but guide us onwards, ever reaching, ever learning, into the dark.

——————————————————————————————————

The last piece before the break.