Zygotic
Kara walks through yesterday’s snow. She’s wearing an embroidered coat, full of patterns, trying to keep life, rich and cluttered and complicated, like the mathematics. But today the snow is more enchanting. Her mind dutifully spins with how mathematically crafted each snowdrop is, how that adds to the beauty of the fallen white.
It’s a peaceful relief from the rush and chaos of last night’s student bar. Where faces, and conversations rushed and bubbled like un-mappable turbulence: One person in particular preoccupied her thoughts. The sandy-haired man in the Victorian style coat, who hovered close by, always looking like he was going to walk away, until she shared something about her studies, holding his drink, awkwardly.
She can’t work out why he’s still in her head.
Cold as it is, she sits down with her work on a bench outside the exam hall, opening a mathematics book. From her notes, she tries to handle the baby facts and batter them with logic into adult realities. But in the background, she can hear the ticking of the clock over the University Tower. Hearing every passing minute labelled with a ‘tick’ makes the time pass slower. The more agonising the moments become, the more Kara wraps herself up in her work.
She is trying to remember where the baby facts came from, the facts that, with the application of reason, made bigger, more powerful facts. She chases them down to the very beginning, all the way to the zygotic axioms that seeded the mathematics. And the formulae carry on moving, carry on growing, carry on agreeing. They fulfil the predictions they make, explain the discovered world.
All those linking figures. All that expectation.
All of it singing to her.
A couple of girls appear at the top of the hill. The breeze lifts Kara’s papers. She flaps at them, irritated, trying to stop them running away. Another couple of shadows pass her as she pins one sheet down and one voice tugs at her ear. She glances up imperceptibly at the passing shadow, glimpses him and the way that everything around him becomes distorted, concentrated on him.
She’s glad of the breeze because as he walks past with a group of friends whose faces have become familiar, she looks occupied rather than dazzled by his appearance. Kara wants to go straight up to him and ask for his equation so that she can weave it into all of her other intricate patterns. Who is he? Who was he before she found him in the bar? Labels flutter everywhere in Kara’s mind – the definitions that make mathematics work are also motivating forces, the emotions of herself and of everyone else so that she can recognise them when she needs them. Who is he?
He catches her eye and starts.
She smiles inside, relieved that he reacted when she didn’t. Neither of them are going to say anything to each other while they are outside of the pub. The rules are different out here. When he has passed, she imprints his image, tall, scruffy sandy hair, yet again into her head, to last her out until the rest of the world has realigned itself. The observation has not distracted her from her involvement with her work because she is weaving him into every black inked symbol winding over her pages.
“So irrational,” she mutters to herself, and there’s the conundrum, because Kara is rational, ticking, analysing.
Small sharp stabs of cold land on her face, and she notices it has started snowing again, splashing her with clumps of mathematical gems. She wipes them from her reddening face and watches the drips fall, their intricacy dissolving.
If she can map the snowflakes, notice their beauty, then she only has to solve the equation of attraction.
That seems like a simple enough task.
Alex Morrall is and artist and writer. She is the author of ‘Helen and the Grandbees’, published by Legend Press. Her poetry appeared in Smiths Knoll and South Magazine among other journals. She established and runs a small group of writers who meet weekly to write and critique each other’s work. Her next novel ‘Hopeless Bubbling Turbulence’, inspired by her mathematical background is due out later this year.
