The Orbiter.
There is a loneliness that lives in the wanting. Not the quiet, private wanting you nurse in the dark, but the kind everyone can see. The kind where you’ve stepped onto a stage, metaphorical or otherwise, and the pursuit is written all over your face before the verdict is even in.
Noah Kahan’s Orbiter beautifully relays this feeling. It’s the song I didn’t know I needed someone to write. He’s describing losing a Grammy, performing grace under the weight of a very public disappointment, orbiting something he wanted badly enough to grieve in front of the world. I am nowhere near a Grammy stage. But I know that feeling in my bones.
“Look babe, even God is trying to warn you. All this ain’t for you. But I cling to my seat.”
Because here’s the thing no one talks about, it’s not just the losing. It’s the being seen wanting. The knowing that other people know. That they watched you reach, and watched the thing not come. If you carry pride like I do, like armour, like identity, that exposure is its own kind of wound.
So you fight. You pray. You beg God, you beg yourself, you beg a universe you aren’t entirely sure is listening. You scream into it. You bargain with it. You tell yourself the pursuit is enough, that the wanting itself means something. And still, it is not enough. It was never going to be enough. Because it was never just about winning. It was about the doubt, that maybe, this time, you were wrong about yourself.
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“Some will never know they are beautiful until the world points it out for them.”
“It’s not my first time losing, and it will not be my last.”
The cruellest part is the gap. The space between knowing what you are and the world recognising it. And the longer you live there, the more the doubt creeps in. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe the knowing was never proof of anything at all. What do I have to show for it? What is certainty worth if it lives and dies only in me? Some days, if I am honest, it feels less like stubborn faith and more like the last argument of someone who has already lost.
I am not sure I have ever said that out loud before. I am not sure I have ever let myself. This may be the most vulnerable thing I have ever written. But I have been meaning to. So here it is.
To future me, if you’re reading this: I hope you continued to rage against the dying of the light. I hope the world caught up. I hope it feels bigger (you’ll know what I mean). I hope the wanting didn’t make you smaller. And I hope you let yourself be seen, even falling, even losing, because the alternative is disappearing entirely.
And you are too incandescent to disappear.
