Reader orbits reader, one on the fringe of the other’s gravitational pull, neither body exerting pressure on the other beyond the gentle tug of a sleeping moon on black seawater. I like this time with you, dear. I’m off on my own adventure, perilous and strange, but there you are, overlaid on the empty desert rock in my pages, my beloved ghostly totem. We live our lives this way, I think; I go to work and you go to work somewhere else, and we run different errands at different times and our friends in their separate constellations interact and react and collide, and on the bus this morning you ran into a beggar while I was ready to hit the parking-garage ticket lady over the head with her stupid bar, and I ate lunch but you forgot and your coworker brought you coffee — all day we are separate, following our different orbits, but at the back of my mind there’s always the quiet pull of home and our books and you.