Chapter 5C: A Hand to Hold as the World Erodes

Perhaps if I were anyone else, I would feel some sense of embarrassment for bringing her to my empty home in a rundown section of the starlit city. I thought of it as nothing more than the quiet space where each night ended and each morning began, but I saw it vicariously through her hazel eyes when she set her foot upon the doorstep. This dusty home with the barest amenities was a palace to the girl who spent her whole life in the badlands. She stared at the rusted sink with wonder; she jolted backward when she pressed a handle and saw water pour from the faucet.

To her, the clouded water looked like life itself in liquid form. Despite the cracked cup beside her, she cupped her hands to catch the water. Most of it seeped between her fingers, but she pressed her lips into the pooled water and drank it all. This process continued until I realized that she would not stop herself from drinking as long as water still poured from the faucet. It was only when I stopped the stream that she stepped away from the sink and held her aching stomach with her hands. She let out a quiet burp, but then she giggled uncontrollably and covered her face with her scarred hands.

A flickering light faintly illuminated my house, but she stared at the light like a supernova in the sky. She squeaked with enthusiasm when she realized that the dusty light-switch gave her the power to control the light. I could see a simple syllogism manifest in her mind in the form of fascination. If she set the switch down, and the light disappeared when the switch went down, then she possessed the power to plunge the room in shadow. When she lifted the switch, she summoned a shining light so strong that it shrouded the stars in the sky outside. She continued this until she saw the light illuminate a partly-rotted desk on the other side of the room. Her curious heart hurled her into motion; she dashed to the desk where I wearily wasted the last few hours of each worthless night. It was there that I had papers and journals filled with the tortured tears of a tired mind. Some pages were strewn with theorems and equations, but most were marked with wistful words and primitive poems; I had even written lamentations against the stars in the sky for cursing us apart in the first place. They were notebooks filled with nonsense, but she read my words with a growing smile.

She said as she pulled a notebook from the water-stained shelf, “With words you have painted whole worlds for yourself.”

“I called an act of defiance what was really a dream. I would build stories in silence when I wanted to scream. I created worlds without worries, morals, or themes, but sometimes these stories became too extreme.”

Aeliana nodded with a breathtaking smile, but I thought I could detect something unspoken underneath her silence. Having never expected any other eyes to fall across the words I wrote in the wasted hours of a quiet night, I generally believed that anyone else would see it as a sign of psychosis. At the very least, I thought that anyone else would read my words and think that I was emotionally locked into an edgy adolescence, but she did not shown signs of either reaction. She had no precepts as she navigated my nonsense-filled notebooks. Then again, it was hard to shock someone who lived in the nightmarish brutality outside the city wall. In a world where murder was mundane and cannibalism was common, she was unperturbed by worthless words written on a page.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” she said as she continued to explore.

I saw in her hands a page covered with letters and symbols. Though the light flickered, I soon recognized it as a differential equation which could not be solved by ordinary means. I had employed a process I partially understood, one that Vaida’s Disciples called a LaPlace transform, to eventually solve the problem on the page. As she tried to make sense of it, Aeliana set her calloused fingers on the letters and numbers she recognized, though she steered clear of the LaPlace operator and the integral which followed.

“Did you ever learn how to do math?” I asked as I still did not know her path.

But Aeliana answered as she nervously shook her head, “The only things I learned were in books left by the dead. I know the bare basics. I can multiply in my head. With just a little algebra… sometimes I could get x by itself. It kept my mind alive on sleepless nights, but… all the math in the world didn’t do anything for me in the desert.”

I could see a nervous look arise in her eyes, but I took her hands and confessed, “Math never saved me from my misery. It’s a hobby at worst and a frail guess at a fleeting future at best. This method here is an interesting one – probably my favorite in all of mathematics. It’s called a LaPlace transform, and we use it when the algebra of our world is too weak to solve an equation. This process translates the equation from our dimension to another, from a domain of time to frequency instead. We then use the algebra of that second world to solve the equation we couldn’t before, and then at the very end, we translate the result back into our dimension as the final answer. So in the end, the problem arrives at the same answer for which it was always destined, but it danced across dimensions just to get there.”

Aeliana continued to gaze over the poorly-scribbled equations in the notebook, but I could see through the window of her hazel eyes that she was deep in thought. Even when she closed the notebook full of nonsense, she stood upright and stared ahead as if she stood in different worlds at the same time. She stared as if she were in a dream; her eyes were wide but could not see a thing.

She whispered as she lifted her hand to her head, “I think that this is exactly as you said. It was written in stone by fate all along. Our paths were destined to cross and converge, but I never could have found you in the world outside this city. The truth called to me like the echo of an empty existence far away from this place. Almost like our entanglement crossed dimensions and converged with the logic of another world. When I finally realized the reality, it was like the translation of a question I never knew I asked. Anyone else would dismiss the driving whisper. Anyone else would have run away from the wall.”

“The stars strived to separate us, but destiny demands we destroy that divergence. We are more than just destined for each other, and this is more than mere entanglement. I believe that our souls were forged at the same time as the planets and the stars. We were meant for an eternity together, but the stars in the sky envied the strength of our union, and that’s why they dare to divide us. No matter how many obstacles fall in our way, we will destroy them and always come together in the end,” I explained to the girl I would die to defend.

Moisture settled in her eyes as she nodded excitedly. She set her hand on my shoulder and pulled me closer, but I froze when our faces were inches apart. A tear descended from her right eye and shimmered in the flickering light of my quiet home. I could hear her heart hopelessly pound in her chest. I wanted to kiss her gently and express our love as lovers do, but I felt my limbs freeze beneath me. I could not kiss her yet; she’s perfect, so I embraced her there instead. She stood in silent shock, almost as if she were petrified by a force she did not understand, but then she relaxed all at once. She almost fell limp in my embrace, and then she wrapped her arms around me. I knew in that moment that we were ephemeral and also eternal, like a cosine and its inverse trapped in an identity, desperately seeking each other so that we could shed our stagnant shells and step together into spacetime itself.

I whispered in her ear as I held her hand in mine, “When I first found you, I was at the end of the line. I think that you saved me – that you found me just in time.”

Author's note: If you've made it this far, please follow me on instagram at J.M.Ashwood. Hope to see you there, even though I should be more active!