how things end

(originally posted 5/29/2013)

She closed the door so softly that he wasn’t even sure it was closed all the way, like it was inevitable that it would creep back open almost like a yawn.

That’s how things end. Not with a whimper or a bang so much as an unanswered question. Like the question of what exactly she meant when she said he was too much like a television and not enough like a mailbox.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t bright enough to figure it out so much as it was he wasn’t anxious to go on that particular field trip. There were too many stops at too many places he’d rather have passed at a high rate of speed. They were daunting even as a blur. G.K. Chesterton once said that “the whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” He believed it. And he believed that she believed it and that was the whole point of her wanting to go out so much.

To win the war without firing a shot.

She would wonder why everything with him was a battle. A contest. She would often quote Mahatma Gandhi at these times and say “an eye for an eye only ends up making the world blind” and he would rage that Gandhi was an idiot and that an eye for an eye still left everyone with an eye. Perhaps their depth perception would be a little lacking but it was just like her to exaggerate and to be bad at math when it suited her.

On perhaps an unrelated note, radioactive atoms are also unstable. They breakdown and turn into a completely different substance over time. You can never tell when it will begin but you can, however,  tell how long it will take for half the nuclei of the isotope to decay. You wonder if another atom looks at it at some point and says “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

All the requests for him to slip out of his caveman suit and into something a little more endearing…  the mock surprise at each request, his club carefully hidden behind the couch but always within easy reach.

Her. The virgin in the bedroom and the slut in the kitchen. Always on the tip of his tongue and the edge of his seat.

When she wanted to see a heart on his sleeve it always ended up being his dick.

He was the bull to her china shop. He despised all the metaphors and it seemed to everyone involved that there were just too many things she wouldn’t swallow. He was feeling very Capistrano.

Neither of them are familiar with the work of Werner Heisenberg, but let me quickly interject here that he once observed that the incomplete knowledge of a system must be an essential part of every formulation in quantum theory. To give an example (his, not mine): we know that the radium atom emits alpha-radiation. Quantum theory can give us an indication of the probability that the alpha-particle will leave the nucleus in unit time, but it cannot predict at what precise point in time the emission will occur, for this is uncertain in principle.

Not sure that helps clarify anything but the world is usually clear enough so I stand behind my decision to include it.

When he needed her to need him it was always bad timing. Wrong for her then wrong for him.

Then wrong for them.

By the time it stopped being wrong there was no them.

Carbon-14 was already nitrogen-14.

The following day started with stretch and a yawn and the realization that the door was still closed.