I love endings. Let's begin there.
The last day I spent with my girlfriend, Lucia, before velocity and inertia carried me away and away from that tiny town in the high desert, her bedroom floor was our final frontier.
As Morrison Hotel spun again and agai
(more)n on her record player, I rolled her dreadlocks ever tighter between my fingertips and whispered the lyrics of "The Spy" to her:
"I know your deepest secret fear,
I know everything."
Behind the words, a piano riff slow and bright as honey trickled, keys sending shivers down strings. From the flat disc of the record's universe, the vibrations of those strings touched us like we wouldn't touch each other.
*
There on her plush rug, while we were two touching but still open strings, enough of our boundless dimensions overlapped that the tin can telephones of our mouths melded, and messages that had traveled for light years were received, finally, and decoded with infinite care during a spontaneous case of time dilation.
*
String theory is elegant in its ability to describe invisible things. A hypothetical string, being one-dimensional, has the dimension of length but not width nor height. Picture one.
You can't. Length alone is undetectable.
Like visualizing the length of a song, the length of a love affair, the true length of the dreadlocked hair of a girl I knew, whose strings were as tangled as mine.
*
Physicists struggle to unify the complimentary but different equations they say describe the universe. I say do this:
Write each equation on a chalkboard big as a house. Write the next one over the top of it. And the next. Like the faces of successive lovers, like the years of an invisible life, like many piano keys struck at once, singing in every dimension.
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