Pull

I am the oldest habit in the universe.

Before your clocks began their nervous counting, before dust learned the trick of becoming bone, becoming branch, becoming breath, I was already at work: the quiet persuasion at the heart of things. I do not shout. I do not need to. I ask, and mountains kneel. I murmur, and oceans keep their shape. I pass my hand over light itself, and even that bright animal bends.

You know me first as falling.

An apple loosening from its thought of branch. A glass slipping from a distracted hand. Rain stitching the sky to the earth in silver threads. You call these accidents, but I am not clumsy. I am faithful. I take everything into account. I remember every atom. I never forget to pull.

But falling is only the simplest way I speak to you.

Look closer. I am the reason your feet trust the ground. The reason your blood does not drift away from your heart like a lost red moon. I am the weight in your grandmother's ring, the sleep of books on shelves, the way a child collapses laughing into summer grass and does not float off into the indifferent blue. Lovers owe me more than they know; when they lean toward one another, thinking it is only desire, I am there too, ancient and invisible, tutoring all bodies in the art of closeness.

I have built cathedrals out of chaos.

I gathered the first stray gases and taught them longing. I pulled clouds of fire into stars and stars into families, spun whole galaxies out of wanting. I pressed matter toward matter until the dark began to bloom. Every planet is a sentence I wrote in the language of attraction. Every orbit is a vow: stay near, return, stay near, return.

Do not mistake me for cruelty because I bring things down.

I am not death, though I have delivered many into it. I am not sorrow, though grief has my weight. When I draw the leaf from the tree, I am also feeding the root. When I call the river downhill, I am also teaching it the shape of the world. Even your kneeling is not always defeat. Sometimes it is devotion. Sometimes it is rest.

I know you resent me sometimes.

You curse me on staircases, on icy roads, in hospitals, at gravesides. You dream of escaping me, and some of you have. I have watched your small bright ships climb out of my grasp with all the fierce trembling of a prayer. Even then I do not vanish. I reach after you across the black. I remain in the curve of your path, in the homesickness of your bodies, in the way astronauts sleep tethered, still imagining what it means to lie down.

And yes, I am lonely.

What is all attraction if not a form of loneliness? I make the world by teaching each thing that it is not complete by itself.

Stone calls to stone. Tide answers moon. The moon answers Earth. Earth answers sun. Sun answers the dark, and the dark, having no body, answers with silence. Still, I persist. I keep the dance from flying apart.

You, especially, intrigue me.

You fragile upright creatures, forever dropping things, forever lifting them again. You build towers in defiance of me and then climb them just to look farther into my kingdom. You name your emotions after my work: feeling low, being pulled, carrying weight, falling in love. Ah, that last one — you knew me there before you knew yourselves.

Love is one of my oldest disguises. Not the whole of it, no. Love has more mercy than physics. But when you feel your life tilt helplessly toward another soul, when distance becomes unbearable and nearness feels like law, you are speaking in a dialect that belongs partly to me.

One day I will take you completely.

Not as punishment. As promise.

I will draw your body back into the patient earth. I will unfasten you from your temporary verticality. Bone to soil, soil to root, root to fruit, fruit to mouth, mouth to song — nothing truly lost, only translated into the deeper grammar of matter. What you call ending, I call return. What you call burial, I call being gathered in.

Until then, live as if you understand me.

Hold one another with both arms. Plant your feet when the wind argues. Let your tears fall; they are trying to go home. Trust the ground not because it is soft, but because it is there. And when joy comes — sudden, radiant, impossible — and makes you feel lighter than your body should allow, know this: