Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Egard OrodeJune 26, 2025

There should be a measurement for this—
The rate at which wanting decays

Does it halve like uranium? Every 4.5 billion years
A little less desperate to be touched?
Or is it more like carbon? 5,730 years
And I’ll only want you half as much as I do now?

Scientists haven’t studied the isotopes of heartache
Haven’t carbon-dated the residue of longing
Haven’t mapped the geological layers
Of all the words I’ve swallowed instead of saying

So I’m left to measure it myself
In cups of coffee gone cold
in songs I can no longer listen to
In the phantom weight of your head on my shoulder
In how many blocks I’m willing to walk
To avoid places you might be

I want to believe in exponential decay
That tomorrow I will want you
Only half as much as today
And the next day, half again
Until wanting you is so small
It could balance on the head of a pin
Alongside all those dancing angels
We used to argue about

But the truth is
Some elements never fully disappear
They just become trace amounts
Background radiation
The kind you learn to live with
The kind that changes your cells
So slowly you don’t notice
Until one day you realize
You’ve become an entirely different person
Composed of all the things
You couldn’t let go of

The latest from america

A community gathers in resistance. Photo by Dany Díaz Mejía. Photo courtesy of Rene Aleman Resistance Camp.
“We are alive only through the grace of God. At one point, I got messages saying someone had offered 1 million lempiras [$38,000] to have me killed.”
Dany Díaz MejíaJuly 02, 2025
Workers unload food commodities from Catholic Relief Services and USAID in the village of Behera, near Tulear, Madagascar, Oct. 22, 2016. (OSV News Photo/Nancy McNally, Catholic Relief Services)
The end of U.S.A.I.D. will result in the loss of a “staggering” 14 million lives by 2030, including the deaths of 4.5 million children under age 5.
Kevin ClarkeJuly 02, 2025
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, by Father Terrance Klein
Terrance KleinJuly 02, 2025