Orbiting is what happens after ghosting, sometimes, when the ghost cannot quite relinquish their claim. Or it is what happens between two people who parted without clear resolution, who exist in each other's digital peripheral vision, touching occasionally, distantly, through the safe medium of a double-tap. It is intimacy converted into surveillance; connection converted into observation.
What orbiting reveals is that endings are harder to make than beginnings. Beginning a relationship requires a single moment of courage. Ending one, in the digital present, requires something considerably more sustained: the willingness to actually leave, to remove oneself from the orbit of another person's visibility, to accept that the connection is over and that accepting this means no longer watching from a distance as they continue to live. The orbit is not hope. It is the refusal of finality dressed as something softer.