Orbiting

The title of this post is taken from a short story by Bharati Mukherjee. In it, the main character's lover, an Afghan immigrant to America, tells her family about "orbiting" various international airports after fleeing his country. I won't tell you how the story ends; read it for yourself. I decided to use the word because I thought it very apt. If you think about it, all we do in life is orbit around certain goals, certain beliefs, and certain people. We change our path of orbit every now and then, we have our personal equivalents of the sun and the moon, we experience "perihelion", "perigee", "aphelion", "apogee"; some of us "revolve" faster than others, and we all have a "dark side". (It is amusing to think that whatever we point to in nature has characteristics that can be attributed to us. So much for the debunking of myths and the anthropocentric theory. They still have some relevance. )

I came up with this theory of orbiting because I recently felt that I was at loose ends. I am orbiting right now between doubt and certainty, between reading my books and reading chem notes, between the past and the future. I do not know why things bother me this way. They just do on such a regular basis; my cycle of orbits are already so convoluted I am bewildered by every little thing. So much has happened since I last wrote, and I feel more than ever that I am a lonely sphere of rock floating away into space; not even a planet, I am dwarfed by the vast expanse of weightlessness, the imposing pull of others' gravitational fields. I am not depressed, but there is an indefinable thing that eludes me. What is it, and what is my life? To that, I know not the answer any more than you do.