There was always more than distance.
There are trajectories, orbits,
the delta-V of any object in motion.
There are equations which will predict
these motions; cold hard facts
that show that comet Swift-Tuttle
will not return for x years.
Its debris will still cause the meteor shower
I am watching again,
and I will understand,
only vaguely,
how it is
that the whole universe
moves.
Twenty years later,
thirty years later,
my birthdays have gathered
and these meteors still fall to the earth.
Consumed in the friction
of air that I still breathe
in an all but dead and dry garden,
and you are gone,
and there are no calculations
I can make which will reach
across the distance you
have gone.