Did you know that the moon doesn't produce its own light? The glow of the sun reflects onto its surface to animate it.

Lately, I've made it a point to take wide-eyed walks from my apartment in Pilsen to my hosting job in River North—one hour and twenty minutes of dream pop and viaducts turned industrial techno and Chicago Riverwalk. Treading along one late afternoon I found that the moon floated as brightly as a freshwater pearl in a deep blue sky. My curiosity swelled as though this pearly moon was washed ashore, just for me. I scoured the web to understand how it posed such luminosity in the middle of the day. Eventually, I stumbled onto what astrophysicists call periapsis. I learned that periapsis can be considered a closeness and that the closeness you may find that lasts for days holds the same strength as a closeness that lasts over the span of years.

For as long as we could, the moon and I followed one another and during those passing moments I felt as close to self-surrender and allowance and possibility and withdrawal and obscurity and invisibility all sutured together. (culled from my diary, January 30, 2024)

The way one encounters what one cannot see

In astronomy, for every two-body system that shares an elliptical orbit, there will always exist a period of time where the masses are at their closest point of approach. This proximal junction is known as “periapsis,” a circular orbit whose trajectory varies depending on the two objects in relation. For instance, the periapsis of a planet around a star diverges widely and dramatically from the periapsis of a satellite around an asteroid. The orbital revolution of each two-body reference is dictated by its own comportment—reflecting unique coordination, guidance, and parameters. I began to wonder about the ways that orbital elements of a two-body system are not conditional to celestial objects but could translate intimately to people, places, or even beingness. I thought about a bright and brief periapsis you might feel with a flower one morning when noticing the dew from the night before still lingering on its petals, or the everlasting periapsis felt with a body of water as you mutually shape and reshape over time, or the sweet and dizzying spiral of lovers who share a diaphanous glance across a room filled with strangers.

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At one point or another, in any relationship that you have with someone or something, there exists a periapsis: the intimately mundane points of encounter that follow a path of discrete magnitude toward the possibility of becoming an unfathomable world apart and away from. The locus of periapsis considers intimacy as a spatial and temporal presence. It collapses the region of violence brought on by the current apocalypse and brings the substance of supportive alignment to the forefront. I find myself preoccupied with how this phenomenon formulates the closeness needed to create a boundless space of no/thingness known as a black hole—an abyss, a recess, a chasm, an opening, a lacuna, a clearing, a (trap) door—emphasizing the supple invocation of darkness and shadows as grounds for speculation, contestation, and possibility. The space of no/thingness created at the moment where two bodies find themselves at the point of closest encounter fascinates me, especially when those organic bodies are Black and femme. The theoretical parallels between the condition of Blackness and planetary dark matter as “invisible and unknowable, yet somehow still there,” as carefully circled by Black studies and surveillance studies scholar Simone Browne, demands slowness and sustained attention.

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In a love letter written by Alexis De Veaux about June Jordan, De Veaux narrates the expansive and enduring love shared in their periapsis. Recounting the exact moment she met Jordan, she hums, “I encounter her. The way one encounters what one cannot see—force, cosmic energy, the way, I imagine, planets, stars, other constellations encounter each other; by way of light, vibration, cruising the other's orbit. I do not see her come in.” De Veaux offers me another reading of the embodiment of “invisible” and “unknowable” through her use of encounter as simultaneously casual and monumentous. The quietude of encounter as not a space of enunciation and articulation, but as a no-place where love meets projecting a covering of protection brimming with expansive fulfillment. The periapsis of De Veaux and Jordan seems tied to the often overlooked, but not unnoticed, love act of presently listening. Jordan's orbital revolution isn't announced with De Veaux, she simply arrives—existing in a manner of peripherality that became an energizing force which moved mountains in their worlds. This subtle and everlasting force of attraction, which is already understood as the imaginary concept of “gravitational fields,” generates the means for which circularity in love is made possible: periapsis allows for love to remain as a force, though its pull varies throughout time.

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De Veaux has written and published many love letters to and about Jordan. And as I understand it, it has become a gesture of benevolent conjuring; a devotional act, a durational holding of love as a faculty, a continuum of periapsis that defies the laws of spacetime by way of determination not to allow her memory and their love to evaporate. De Veaux and Jordan occupied a periapsis whose intimacies unsettled, untethered, and unbound their autonomously beheld constitution while being a defensible dwelling for one another. Perhaps their closeness provided particular shelter and discrete boundaries or strategies of queer, femme assembly and dissemblance. Nevertheless, with every circle they made around each other, their closeness created (w)hole worlds apart from the destruction around them.

The way one encounters what one cannot see

The way one encounters what one cannot see

Periapsis—if either with a body in or outside of the self—reminds me of the elliptically dynamic and complicated love that courses through our interrelation and subjectivity. For me, the argument of periapsis has evolved into the paradigm of periapsis, or:

The way one encounters what one cannot see
The way one encounters what one cannot hear
The way one encounters what one cannot fathom
The way one encounters what one cannot perceive
The way one encounters what one cannot explain
The way one encounters what one cannot decode
The way one encounters what one cannot translate
The way one encounters what one cannot decipher
The way one encounters what one cannot articulate
The way one encounters what one cannot determine
The way one encounters what one cannot consume
The way one encounters what one cannot translate
The way one encounters what one cannot comprehend
The way one encounters what one cannot disentangle
The way one encounters what one cannot grasp
The way one encounters what one cannot………

Thank you Alexis De Veaux and June Jordan and Linda Sharrock and Lila Young and…