things we

The Physics of Our Lovestory

Artwork by Bettina Krieg via AXS ART

I had a bad habit of leaving my stuff at your place. Not because I was forgetful. But because we would always end up fighting. This usually resulted in me storming out on you in a rush and abandoning my belongings. This happened so often that you had a shelf designated to holding my stuff. The first thing you ever put on that shelf was a book I got you on Cosmic Science. I’ve forgotten the title and have too much pride to text you for it. I got it for you as an early birthday present, but you never read it, so it just sat on that shelf, drowning under the accumulated pile of forgotten items.

I got it for you because of how much you liked the movie Interstellar. It started my obsession with quantum physics and black holes, which was how I found the book at Indigo. I remembered skimming through the pages on my lunch break and stopping on one of the chapters. For some reason a book about strings and space spoke to me more than any piece of poetry ever did.

Quantum physics states that there are 10 different dimensions, the tenth being time. We exist within a three-dimensional reality, consisting of width, length and depth, which together make up this physical realm. The fifth and sixth dimension introduce the possibility of time travel. Within these two dimensions different worlds exist, with either the same or differing preconditions that created earth. The fifth dimension constitutes a world that is slightly different from ours, with “identical preconditions” but “differing subsequent actions.” One that would allow me to conceive a reality where we met the same way, but acted differently. The sixth dimension is one of different beginnings and different outcomes altogether. A reality where we meet on different terms, with dissimilar events and actions as a result.

Both dimensions present a universe where we could have existed differently. After we ended, I found comfort in imagining a dimension where I hadn’t met you. The science behind the theoretical quantum physics made it more alive to me for some reason. Like the term ‘theoretical’ was more legitimate than ‘magical.’ Travelling through dimensions in my mind was the only coping mechanism I had.

Originally I used to imagine a dimension where we never met. In this world I never bought that book or learned these things because I hadn’t met you. I couldn’t find solace in this world because the person I was before I had met you was scared of her own body and didn’t trust the sound of her voice. We had to meet in this life.

Then I thought of a world where you were different, and I was different. We met through different preconditions coupled with divergent versions of us. In this world you didn’t carry the weight of your past. This version of you didn’t break promises or make me cry. I was bolder in this world, because you always wanted me to be less timid. But this dimension doesn’t exist. You liked how quiet I was. That’s why we started talking in the first place. Time travel can’t change who we are, nor can it change who we were always meant to be.

The last dimension I succumbed to fabricating was one almost identical to this one. In this dimension, there didn’t exist a shelf that served as a scoreboard for our fights. Instead, the shelf houses the books I buy you and not vice versa. In this dimension, we stayed friends even though we didn’t work out. But this contradicts the laws of physics, which states that nothing physical is guaranteed to be infinite.

I tried my best to keep us in each other’s lives. But eventually the shaky columns that held us up started to crumble, and before I knew it, I was standing over our ruins. We couldn’t stay friends for the same reason we couldn’t be lovers: we are temporary, like almost everything else in the cosmos. Quantum physics does state however that the universe is infinite in one aspect: its expansion – which the book attributed to something called “General Relativity.” Under this theory, the eternal expansion of the universe means that space and time is always increasing between worlds, dimensions and galaxies and so is the distance between them.

This means that my ability to visit these fictional realities minimizes with time. That with time, the sadness and the pain will compress, growing smaller, engulfed in the magnitude of space-time. We will meet other people and as a result have new dimensions and possibilities to distract us with potentially different lives. Time is destined to overpower the dimensions I had dreamt up, and to swallow all other possible realities with it. I will forget about you one day because we are temporary.

You will eventually move from this apartment, clearing the shelf that held my place in your life. Maybe the book with no name will find a new home, a new narrator. I hope it finds someone who needs to know how impermanent we all are. As there is solace in this, insignificance opens us to change at any and all points in time. Change means the potential for growth, to expand our own universes, to birth new galaxies and worlds – as our small, temporary entities ride the currents of time.

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Personal Essay by Jazmyn Himel 

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