by: Alex and Eboni
Sometimes we love someone so much we start to disappear. We turn them into a god and ourselves into a shadow. We think we have to either leave them and feel empty, or stay and get burned.
“Unlearning Gravity” is about a different choice. It is about the hard work of seeing a person for who they really are, just a human instead of a sun you have to orbit. It asks if it’s possible to keep someone in your life without losing yourself in the process. It is a poem about standing still and refusing to fall.
Unlearning Gravity
I stand at a shoreline
that does not belong to land.
Two tides argue over me—
one says leave,
one says remain,
and both speak in your voice.
If I sever you—
it would not be clean.
No blade exists for something
that was never whole to begin with.
You are not a limb
I can cauterize and forget—
you are the sun
and the sky.
I could exile you from my days,
lock every door your name has touched,
teach my hands
to forget the shape of your presence.
But absence would sketch you anyway
in the margins of everything.
And I would learn a new kind of hunger—
not the burning one,
not the molten, luminous ache—
but the slow, hollow famine
of knowing there is something I chose
never to touch again.
A quieter suffering.
A colder one.
The kind that does not glow
but endures.
If I keep you—
the you I have created—
I already know the ending.
I will continue to dissolve
at the slightest tilt of your attention,
continue this fragile illusion
where I flicker into being
only when you look my way.
I will become a season
that exists for a single sun,
a reflection rehearsing light
it cannot generate.
I will fall into my sorrow,
and I may never return.
And you—
unaware, unburdened—
will remain whole,
while I break beautifully
in your wake.
It is a familiar ruin.
There is comfort in knowing
exactly how I will be destroyed.
So I stand here—
with absence in one hand
and erosion in the other,
trying to decide
which form of vanishing
belongs to me.
But there is a third thing—
quieter than both,
and far more dangerous
because it asks something more of me.
Not distance.
Not surrender.
But translation.
What if you are not a sun?
What if the light I keep calling yours
is only passing through you—
briefly,
accidentally—
and I have mistaken my sun for yours?
What if I could look away from you
and not disappear—
not because you changed,
but because I refused
to vanish?
This would mean
unlearning gravity.
Teaching my bones
that they are not pulled
by your orbit.
It would mean
keeping you
without kneeling.
I have seen this before,
I have tried this before.
I only succeeded when it was too late.
Staying—
without surrendering the architecture
of myself.
But I do not know
if I can.
I never seem able.
I have already rewritten you
in the language of miracles,
already carved you into something
larger than human—
and how does one
gently reduce their sunlight
back into a boy
without breaking the altar?
Still—
this third path lingers
like a question.
Not absence.
Not ruin.
But restraint.
An infatuation that does not consume
the one who holds it.
And I hover here—
at the edge of decision,
hands full of endings
I do not trust,
wondering if I am strong enough
to choose the only option
that does not promise clarity.
Because to lose you
would be to grieve.
To keep you
would be to burn.
But to change the way I see you—
that is to stand in the fire
and refuse
to become consumed by it.
The poet is stuck between two bad choices: leaving and feeling a “cold hunger,” or staying and “dissolving” because they care too much. They realize they have treated this other person like a god, but that god is just a “boy.”
The “third path” is about balance. It means learning to love someone without letting them become your whole world. It’s about “unlearning gravity” the feeling that you have to crash into someone else just to feel something. It’s a reminder that the light you see in others is often your own light, and you don’t have to disappear just because they aren’t looking at you.
