Magnetic Moment

Entwined with each other

Lying in the silence of the night,

Your Vernier caliper

My coffee mug,

Your telescope’s voyeuristic gaze

Pages of my poetry,

A blackboard for your calculations

A bulletin board for my incoherently coherent ideas,

Your chalk-smeared fingertips

My ink-stained palm,

Your documents of experiments and observations

My pile of manuscripts waiting for acceptance,

Your debates of heliocentricity

My verses on individualism,

The globe on your desk representing the Earth

My words containing the essence of the universe

Beakers, screw gauge, convex and concave lenses

Tote bags, motivational posters, pens and journals,

The resonance of your tuning fork

The scratching of my pen on paper,

Your animated conversation about the wonders of Science

My impassioned discourse on the power of Literature,

Your bookshelf filled with hardbound books of equations, graphs and statistics

My bookshelf comprising gateways to different worlds,

Your predilection for Science

My proclivity for Literature,

Your cluttered desk

My cluttered desk,

Your Chemistry

Our chemistry,

My stories

Our story,

Your naturally poetic style

My rational propositions,

You picking up Great Expectations for me

Me writing a scientific poem for you,

You reading my drafts

Me scrutinizing your case files,

Often diminished by others

As an asymmetrical liaison,

Resurfacing my fear that you’ll get tired of my quirks

And this will fade away

Like every other relationship

This too will leave me stranded,

But then you reiterate “I adore you”

Like a Hubble telescope participating

In the soft intimacy of stars 

Being born in the privacy of their cosmic cradles,

The synchronicity of our eye contact

Our joint dream of seeing the Northern Lights,

The intimacy in the belongings of the beloved

The closeness of our touch

Our metaphors and hypotheses,

The home we made in the post-pandemic world

The subtle superposition of our different wavelengths

Our Sci-Lit alliance.