We entered the world with a bang—
a hot knot of plasma and awe,
siblings packed tighter than quarks
in the nursery of our mother’s arms.
Ricocheting like newborn photons—
elastic with sugar and summer—
I rolled you laughing through corridors,
your little legs braced in that plastic walker,
the garden rushing past like galaxies.
You gripped the tray in terror and trust.
We struck walls, rebounded,
measured rooms by the pitch of laughter and screams.
As boys we spun in tight, chaotic orbits—
colliding, careening, shaping each other’s paths,
gravity braided from bunk-bed secrets,
homework, hand-me-downs.
That rock you threw—
Meant for Eoin you still protest—
Which found my temple, a clean arc,
My blood, your trembling.
You hid in the sand dunes,
as I was carried—sirens, scans,
our father’s hand cold at the wrist.
You never stopped saying sorry.
Not even in your sleep.
We traced ellipses round one another,
sometimes colliding, sometimes
sling-shotting clear to cool.
Later, orbiting no one,
I drifted—friendless, diffuse—
and you pulled me in.
Your circle became my shelter:
bonfires, borrowed jackets,
someone always saving me a seat.
Coming of age, it seems,
the pulsar and the magnetar still
have something left to teach each other.
But the universe keeps its own ledger.
Dark energy hums beneath mortgages,
plane tickets, changing postcodes—
year on year, the metric stretches.
Light that left your kitchen window
reaches me red-handed, tired, late.
When I lay grey in a ward,
you stitched a constellation of visits—
one warm body each day,
orbiting through pain,
reminding me to return.
Peer through the telescope of next:
we may sit at contrary ends of entropy,
too faint for binoculars or packet data,
mere afterglow in some colder sky—
voices stretched beyond retrieval.
Yet here, in the slack between ignition and hush,
I tune the cosmic background shimmer
of your laughter saved on voicemail—
proof that expansion has not yet torn
every filament of us from memory’s gravity.