August 26th, 2026

There's a Wobble in My Orbit

trying to find a handhold. a foothold. something to press my weight against and trust.

something in me is shifting - not breaking, not lost - just no longer where i left it. an inkling. a deja vu of a deja vu, familiar and unfamiliar folded into the same instant.

not just an unfamiliarity with the shape of things, but something like a quantum paradigm. not real until it's observed. i think of schrödinger's cat sealed in the dark.

is the cat i can't see alive or dead.

is the universe i wake into friendly or merely benign.

is the man looking back at me in the mirror inherently good.

mañana on all of these.

~

astronomers found new worlds this way. not by seeing them - too dim, too far - but by watching a star wobble and asking what unseen mass could pull like that. the star doesn't move alone. it dances with what dances against it, invisible, known only by the shake in its light.

i wonder now if my wobble is proof and not problem. not a flaw in the orbit. something riding in it with me. a mass i haven't named and can't measure directly - only by the way i've started to lean.

maybe i've been circling for years around a companion i couldn't observe. only infer. from the weight certain rooms carry now. from what shows up at 3am uninvited, sitting at the foot of the bed like it's always lived there. from the way the same three questions keep their shape no matter what year i ask them in.

~

you can know where a thing is. or where it's going. not both. not at once. not with the same clean certainty. i keep wanting both. i keep wanting position and trajectory pinned down before i'll risk the next step, and it's the taking of the step that makes either one real.

so maybe the wobble isn't a malfunction to steady before i can walk right. maybe it's the only instrument i've got. the shake in the reading is the reading.

 Human Destiny

Pablo Neruda

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.