Begrudgingly Tertiary by Angela Acosta
214 words
Issue 1 (Winter, February 2023)
The self I sent into space was impartial to the whims of humans who somehow experience attraction stronger than gravity, pulling their lives into orbit with just a passing glance. I always so self-righteously declared that I wasn’t one of those allos who caves in and lets romantic love enrapture them into an engagement while lust beguiles the senses with neurotransmitters. Loathe as I am to admit it, the tertiary kind of alterous attraction suits me just fine, a sapphic little trilingual astronaut who can never just settle on one planet but prefers the tesseract of contradictions and possibilities inherent in QPRs held together stronger than quantum chromodynamics. Perhaps there is a theory for why a platonic sort of sapphic love keeps me tethered to humankind, proof of how love works both as strong waves beating against currents of star systems and particles of single selves wrestling with the loneliness of tertiary axes in coordinate planes that could never fully describe a multidimensional universe. They are, after all, mere models and explanations, always a little fuzzy while the real deal cannot be described with words, only lived begrudgingly by those who always saw biology’s fractals and the inevitabilities of human nature for what they were, possibilities for finding heart and home no matter the conditions.