Short STory – Love : The Ephemeral
Photo credit: earl53 from morguefile.com
The way physicist’s love these days!
I saw him coming and immediately serotonin flooded my veins. His strut said it all, he was happy that the professor had managed to answer all his questions. He caught me staring at him and I immediately turned 20 degrees east. I wonder how instead of being two wires carrying opposite currents (like we usually were), he changed his conformation to a dipole placed in an external field. He suddenly aligned himself in my direction and gave me a smile. Before I could decide on which pair of muscles I should contract and relax (my face or hand), he was in front of me. Maybe length had contracted for him or perhaps I was myopic for he was at my table in a blink. My ventricles suddenly stopped pumping in oxygen because I couldn’t breathe and look at him in the same frame simultaneously. He was adorable. Robert Lends- a tall, fair and handsome guy; together we could be a Cooper pair, a superconductor!!
His brown hair was defying gravity; flying in the air without any external force, or was it my mind playing tricks on me? His fluoride smile was indenting me. I had holes in my speech literally, couldn’t mumble anything more than a meek ‘Hi’.
He pulled a chair and sat on it with his bag swinging around him, completing a full sine wave. “How are you doing”, he asked. “I am good”, was all my voice box managed to blurt out. “Heard you fell down the stairs yesterday, sorry for that.”
“Yeah, I was drained of glucose just when I was on the stairs and not surprisingly I lost control, rolled down the stairs, broke a bone and am now on crutches. Thanks to them, time seems to be dilated, everything takes so long”, I grunted.
He chuckled (and thankfully understood the joke) and added that I needn’t be so pessimistic. “Things were just Fourier transform of Good days and Bad days, after all a straight line even in your ECG would mean you were dead”, he said.
I beamed and was so happy that finally I had met a boson who matched me in all my quantum numbers. We spent a few more minutes chatting about the latest nuclear tests, the recent development in automated walkers (that was for me) and even about the latest humanoid robots.
“You want to air your alveoli? You need a break, looks like you are turning blue.” I cursed myself for ruining the interference which had just started. “Let’s go for a long drive”, he added. I felt like a Schrodinger’s cat, wondering whether I was alive or dead. This nerd had had a total polarization change! I simply agreed and he helped me get my spine feel the gravity’s thrust. It felt like my foot was a pulley with a metric ton of load pulling it down, but all the pain seemed to destructively interfere with itself and I just couldn’t stop smiling.
A true gentleman, he helped me get into the car and slid into the seat beside me. Just then, like a bolt from the blue, James, my ex, leapt into the frame and pulled me out of the car, lifted me in the air and swirled me with a benign frequency and then placed me back onto the earth like a delicate bit of china. I was wondering whether I was in a parallel universe because for a moment I found James handsome than Robert. I was rescued from the conundrum when he told me, his engagement with his bestie was confirmed: the reason why I had to intentionally step over a roller skate, bunk a Stat. Mech. class and instruct a friend to make Robert feel guilty of leaving his skate awry in the gym. I seriously would have loved to be in two universes at the same time.
Well, I was happy for James, much happier for myself. I realized my feet were on the ground and cried out in pain. Not surprisingly Robert came running and slid me carefully into his car again. I waved all my 5 fingers and bid adieu to James, which he returned like a perfect mirror.
I heard the engine roar, the tires screeched against the concrete tarmac and off we went- in an inertial frame where there were no pseudo forces, only one real force of love. I slid my hand into his and leaned back into the comfortable leather seat, smiling to myself, praying that this was the last of any parallel universes I would ever see.
