<silence>
Take the distance between my eyes and hers. The distance between my little finger and her thumb.

The closest point of contact between our two bodies is 5 centimeters.

All the distance that lies between us is 5 centimeters of space.
But how far is that 5 centimeters? How do I cross that distance?

Newton's Law of Gravitation says there is an attractive force between any two bodies in the universe. This force draws the two bodies together, and is a consequence of our mass. It is responsible for the orbits of planets, and the curve of the world.
Its mathematical form is given by the equation - F equals GMm divided by r-squared. Big 'M' meaning me, little 'm' meaning her, r in the denominator, is the distance between us. 5 centimetres.

And the book she is reading. Such a funny title. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

What does the book forget?

What does she forget, and what does she remember?

Does she remember her childhood? The houses that we lived in as
children, that is where the arc of our stories circle back on themselves, like the spiral turns of a staircase.

Does she remember - the first attempt at lighting a cigarette, flushed with feelings of self-destruction? Climbing trees, watching the sky turn silver, sitting on a swing, hoping someone would come along and push her, just so she could feel what it was like to fall. And how long did she stand there quietly, waiting for her first kiss from a boy that she did not even know that well?

She is a story, made up of all these vignettes, of what she remembers, and what she has forgotten.

But in the heart of physics lies the heart of the tragic.

In physics there is this thing called Zeno's Paradox. You can keep
halving the distance between two bodies - 5 to 2.5, to 1.25, but you never reach zero no matter how close you are to it.

I can never cross the distance 'r' however small it gets. The paradox
is a simple geometric progression to infinity, with the fall of each
footstep preventing two bodies from coming together.

She. She is that paradox.

The other day I told my students I could not believe in love - there
are only distances between people. Then one of them told me to go
watch 2046.

The movie was long, and the only thing I remember clearly is people
whispering into holes, holes in walls and trees, and then covering it
with their hands. The hole keeps the secret you see, but it really
doesn't make any sense at all.

Then I came to the conclusion that the hole was actually a metaphor. A metaphor for the human ear, the ear of someone whom you could tell your secret to. Except that the hole doesn't know it's a metaphor. The hole thinks it's a hole keeping secrets for Tony Leung and Faye Wong.

The hole's lack of understanding about itself is similar to our situation on the train. The possibility of our two bodies meeting exists, as does the possibility of any two bodies in the universe meeting. Except that she, like the hole, doesn't know it. She doesn't
know it.

We go through life meeting so many people, some are friends, some are family, and some are the strangers you never meet.
You brush past them as you exit a train, you don't think to make eye contact as you're going down the escalator and the other person is going up. You live next door to them, you sleep in the next room, your lives separated by a wall. You swim past each other in a swimming pool as the wakes caused by your bodies collapse into each other.

Each physical body is a container of stories - stories that are
individual strands of color, calling out into the night. You are so
close, but each person is a story that you will never know.


- end -