I give up on the pose and lie on my back. Corpse pose. I point to myself.

“You’re killing me.”

Mom laughs, then lies next to me, the tips of our fingers touching. We stare at the ceiling, which I helped her paint a long time ago to look like the night sky.

I stargaze with both of my parents, just in different ways.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Did Riley give up on me because I’m so … inflexible?”

An astronaut needs to be disciplined, but not everyone understands that.

My mother reaches out and brushes back my bangs. The sunlight streams through the window behind her and turns her hair into melted chocolate.

“Someday, Mae, you will find your person. Or they will find you. And they will love you for the driven, intelligent, shoot-for-the-moon girl you are. You hold out for them. They’re out there. I know it.”

I smile. “Like you and Dad?”

She leans forward. Presses her lips to my forehead. “Riley’s not your person. But I bet you’ll always be the one that got away.”

It’s not until now, standing outside this Boston yoga studio, that I realize: She didn’t answer my question about her and Dad.

Ben sits next to me, and the weight of my body on the meditation cushion and the weight of his body on the cushion next to mine and the distance between us, which isn’t very much, gets me thinking about Newton and how, maybe, attraction is an expression of the universal law of gravitation.

Everyone who has ever felt something for another person is really just playing out

F = Gm1m2/r2

The force (F) due to gravity between two masses (m1(me) and m2(Ben)) which are a distance apart (r)—in this case, I’d say about six inches. G is the gravitational constant, which is 6.67408 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2.

So the reason I can’t move away when he’s around is simply because of gravity. Just the force of masses.

Ben’s only a math problem.

“It’s just physics,” I say.

He looks at me. “I’ll buy in if you catch me up.”

“I said that out loud?”

He nods. Smiles.

I’ll buy in if you catch me up. No one ever wants to buy in on my thoughts or be caught up except Dad. Mom would try, but her eyes would glaze over as soon as it got too sciencey.

“Ignore me.” I put my eyes on the front of the room. Looking at Ben makes me wobbly. “I’m just on a mental EVA—an Extravehicular Activity, better known as—”

“A space walk—I know. I may be a geophysicist, but I’m not totally clueless.” And then he winks. WINKS!

“Well. That remains to be determined.”