Every morning in the bike lanes on the way to the office, I pedal alongside the same cyclist. He wears a white helmet with red lights on the front and back, black cargo trousers tucked into white crew socks, a pair of orange sneakers hanging by the laces. His bike is narrow, and his calves double the size of mine. With conviction and incredible ease, he weaves in and out of the hoard as if he is always running out of time. Without fail, he manages to pass me despite the fact that I ride on an electric bike that zips down the lanes at 28 MPH. 

Every morning, I briefly pass him without effort and with an unearned smugness. Every morning, he catches up to me. Every morning, I chase him for a reason I don’t know. He turns, I turn. He runs through the red, I run through the red. He brakes, I brake. I am unsure if he is aware that I am dead set on matching his pace. This morning, I discovered our offices stand side by side. I imagine that our mornings are a mirror. That, after the 30-minute slog, he runs up the stairs of our building, sweaty and red-faced, untucking his trousers from his socks, attempting to maintain composure ahead of the impending work day. Just as I do. Sometimes, I think of Jack this way. 

*

Jack is in Kyoto and I am going back to LA. We used to live in tandem, but now our needs and wants have drawn a map, a line tracing our current locations to its furthest edges. Today, I am feeling the fact that I will most likely never see him again. 

Jack, to me, was like a neighbor you occasionally ran into on your way to get groceries—colliding on the corner of your block, catching up for a conversation about the new flowerbeds. Most of the time, we lived in parallel—one rearranging the furniture of their living room, the other hearing the creaks and thumps from the other side of the wall. It is no use now to think of how differently it might have turned out or to imagine a future in which we could rebuild. I couldn’t place him then. I can’t place him now. But where was he? He was always elsewhere. When we were together walking down Renfield Lane, leaving the party before everyone else, where was he? Around the card table at Eglington Street, I remember looking at his face, not quite knowing who it was that I was looking at. There was a dissociating light surrounding the two of us, a gauze wound tightly between our hands, covering an uninhabited island underneath.

I remember telling him I loved him every other day over a period of three months before it was ever acknowledged. It was like shouting “I’m home!” down an empty hallway in hopes that someone had arrived before you. While I never heard an answer, I was certain. I remember declaring it to my friends as I left a New Year's party. As I closed the front door to Rory’s apartment on Dixon Avenue, I shouted “I’M OFF TO GO KISS THE FACE OF THE MAN I LOVE!” I can still see Jack at the after-party, sitting on the floor next to crumbs of tobacco, laughing with his longtime friend. I smiled a lot in the taxi back to Eglington Street, covered in a feeling of certainty I hadn’t felt in a long time.

After we parted ways for the first time, he told me he loved me. Walking back into his yellow-checkered kitchen after what felt like the longest two weeks of my life, I caught a glimpse of a note I had written him during the turmoil of our shared departure. It was a laundry list of the things I adored about him. Every night he gripped a large bottle of sparkling water like a child. Despite living alone, he bought year-long supplies of canned fava beans. A motion censor speaker lived behind his toilet—the sound of birds ringing out each time you opened the door. He constantly fumbled with a pack of cards while entertaining his latest algorithm in his head. He made up rhyme schemes via voice memo on his commute through Glasgow Green. He made me laugh. He always made a certain wide-eyed expression on his face—his mouth tightened to a ball, eyebrows cartoonishly raised—when I looked at him across a crowded room. He danced like an alien who was dropped on Earth for a singular day. He refused to wear glasses even though the landscape softened into a blur six feet ahead. Because of his unwavering reverence for logic, he was certain people likened him to a robot. It was obvious he felt deeply because of the way in which he argued, in the tendrils of thought he had about certain people in his life, even though he always assured that he didn’t care. He cared a lot, and I could see it. To him, the sidewalks were a gold mine. His house was cluttered with the treasures he picked off the ground: rusted key chains, neon charms from a lost bracelet, and unusual paper ephemera. For Christmas, he gifted me a pink plastic key that probably came from a forgotten child’s toy. His sense of wonder was enormous.

*

Jack’s mind spiralled into branches I could not reach. Catching a thread from his network of thoughts was enthralling, enticing—I felt myself expanding as he spoke. He had a nonchalant way of unwinding me. No big deal. It was in those tiny movements of being that I mocked-up a crude portrait of who he was. I pored over trying to figure him out. I don’t think I ever could.

During our winter walks through Queens Park, I remember feeling deeply unsettled. In the ensuing months, I felt I was watching a passing satellite overhead. I could shout, kick, and scream as much as I wanted and still, the satellite would never hear me. It only looked at me from above. You can’t blame a satellite for roving in the way that it was programmed. You can’t shake your fists at birds for migrating south.

The final time we parted ways, I asked him what he loved about me. Over WhatsApp, he coolly listed three lousy words—hot, chill, nice— words that only felt acceptable for someone you’ve known for two days. My heart turned off the lights. How, after all this time, were these three middling things the summation of his thoughts about me? It horrified me. I spent weeks getting high in the early hours, unable to resist displaying my grievances about the total unknowability of other people. I declared love’s non-existence. It was impossible for me to understand. 

*

This morning, on my usual cycle across the Thames, I noticed my cyclist side-eyeing me at the stop light near Elephant and Castle.  At that moment, I thought maybe he’s been chasing me too. Both of us—kinetically linked by our dailiness, our mutual need to pass the other. Maybe he also figured out that we worked next to each other. 

*

It never occurred to me that to Jack, I too was a passing satellite. In a way, our love was expressed by our attempts to reach towards each other.  We were a mirror, trying to touch the reflection. We weren’t the earth and the star passing by, or the birds migrating south and the spectator studying the flock. Maybe we were both hovering above the other, looking from an odd distance, trying to grasp the totality of someone different from ourselves.