Isn’t it strange how someone can just topple your center of gravity? When you first meet them, a heady rush of endorphins pull on your mind and change you like the attraction of the moon to the surface of the earth, ripping undulating waves from stalwart rigidity. This shift, once calamitous, fades into routine.

All of a sudden, I find that I have departed from the mundane. My blue-marbled pearl no longer rotates around your blazing flame. You drift off. I float towards Venus and you, who inched the other way—you’re now caught in the grip of Mars, or perhaps drowned in Neptune’s atmosphere. Sooner or later, another galactic being, effervescent with potential, catches your attention—catches my attention—and we drift apart.

All that remains is a lingering feeling, a ghostly whisper, a phantom pain of where your gravity once existed in me. Your Janus-faced friendship, like a star’s volatile existence, experienced its last nuclear flare. Your gravity no longer pulls on the surface of my skin, but I am acutely aware of the void of your laughter: absent in my life and present in another’s.

My skin tingles in a supernova of hate that absolves into profound sadness. The gravity has shifted. You no longer want my balance; I no longer need your presence. From now on, you and me, who pledged by pinky under the full September moon to reside together in this gravitational field forever, are strangers.