Long one but it's been a while

Physics: The Laws of Me and You
by Emily N

Everything in the universe
Attracts everything else in the universe:
The Law of Universal Gravitation
When did the laws of physics
Become the laws of my life?
When we first met,
I felt the attraction between us
Like the gravitational pull
Of two planets across the universe
But as our galaxies collided,
We spiraled closer to each other
And the forces between us grew stronger.
For every action,
There is an equal and opposite reaction:
Newton’s Second Law of Motion
I don’t know the catalyst,
But I feel the repercussions every day –
Your actions inducing reactions –
And I can’t help but notice the
Spiraling results of these events
Worsening each hour
Actions and reactions
Cause and effect
Give and take
The chaos increases
Contributing to the entropy of our relationship
Until silence
Is all
That remains
No words
No secret smiles
Just the pale flash of your face
As your eyes skim past me
And an icy breath of wind lifts the hair from the back of my neck.
In magnetic fields,
Opposite poles attract
First discovered by Pierre de Maricourt in 1269.
Once we were pulled together
By forces beyond our knowing
But, like the scientifically inexplicable
Flipping of the Earth’s magnetic poles,
Something inside of you has shifted
Like the molten core of iron and magnesium
Suddenly changing its path
Of a hundred thousand years
And swirling against the spin
Of Earth’s rotation
For a reason beyond our comprehension.
I don’t know what happened,
Or how, or why,
But something is different.
You push me away, avoiding my eyes,
And walk past me like I’m not even there,
As though I’m invisible
By some phenomena of the natural world
And like magnets pushed apart by an unseen force,
The closer I get to you,
The farther you pull away
Until all that’s left
Is this unbridgeable gap between us.
The total energy of the universe is constant;
It can be changed or moved,
But never created or destroyed:
The Fundamental Law of the Conservation of Energy
Intellectually, I know I haven’t lost anything,
Even though it feels like
My entire world has fallen away
Beneath me,
Even though I want to cry
Every time I see you walking away,
Even though, sometimes,
I can’t breathe when I think about you,
Because everything is a reminder
Of the way things used to be.
Somehow, I know
You didn’t take anything from me.
We collided elastically
For a brief moment in time
Then spun apart in different directions
New angles of trajectory
Paths unforeseen by either of us
But now we fall back to earth,
The stars flying past us,
Blurring the distinction between dark and light,
Until we enter the atmosphere,
Accelerating at a constant rate
Of 9.81 meters per second squared
Until we reach terminal velocity,
Turning into blazing trails
Of light across the midnight sky
Like the dusty tail of a comet
Nearing earth only once
Every seventy years,
Or the breathless flash
Of a shooting star,
Streaming silently towards
An unseen destination.

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