"Sub Atomic Romance" by Abigail Raymond
When you get down to the subatomic level, where proton and neutrons and electrons spend their eternal days orbiting and bouncing about, you will find that nothing really touches. The protons and neutrons may huddle together, bound by forces that are unseen to all but themselves, but they do not touch. And the electrons certainly never even come close. Their lives are lonely ones, spent rocketing about and forever being repelled from their own kind.
There is a time just before I fall asleep, when I dream but am very much aware that I am doing so. And for the past month, I have been dreaming of a boy. It is a short dream, it consists only of me lying in bed and seeing someone standing over me. He is so vivid to me, that I am certain that I have seen him somewhere before. He looks at me as a father looks at a sleeping child, with love and devotion in his face. I dream of people often, people I have never met and people from my distant past, but this boy seems to haunt me. He has appeared before me each night, reaching out to stroke my hair but the hand never reaches the top of my head. The dream never ends, never comes to a conclusion, and so I must continue to repeat it each night as I drift off into slumber.
My friend thinks I'm losing it.
"I think this means something" I say.
"Maybe it's just a dream," she replies while stirring sugar into her tea, "maybe he's just a figment of your imagination."
"But figments don't reappear every night. They come and go. He stays. Maybe he's real, and he's dreaming of me as well."
"I think you're just projecting your loneliness onto this dream man. You want him to be real because that would mean that you're not so alone."
I tell her I think I need to find friends who aren't philosophy majors, and she doesn’t say another word about it.
But she has a point. I do want him to be real, I want him to dream of me doing the same thing each night. I want him to wonder about me; wonder who I am and why he sees me as he falls asleep. Because it would prove to me that I am not so alone, that my days spent in solitude are not spent in vain. There would be proof of some divine plan, that my life isn't just a series of dull days punctuated by moments of interest, that instead my life has purpose. That my life has some sort of tangible meaning.
When you move a step beyond the realm of sub atomic particles, to a place where you could see the sum of these parts, again you would see that they do not touch. The electron's negative charge causes it to rocket away from any other negative charge, really any other electron. This field exists in everything everywhere. So as you sit in your chair reading this essay your rump and thighs are not resting on plastic or wood or cloth. They are, in fact hovering just above it. When you go home, your house key will not touch the tumblers as it slides into the lock. And when you hold someone, when you kiss them, at the most basic level of matter, your lips will never meet.
We sat next to each other in a movie theater on our second date. My eyes looked shiny in the dim light, and his face looked so full and handsome. I twisted the ring on my index finger as I spoke of dull days in school and at work, and he spoke of literature and his family. Without breaking away from my eyes, he reached out and touched my hand, stopping the fiddling. I had never felt hands so cold before. Stunned by the sudden and intimate act, I briefly paused in my mundane monologue.
"Relax," he said in quiet soothing tones, "you always get so nervous when we go out."
I smiled back and allowed him to kiss me during the movie. He was my first real boyfriend.
Our relationship had the life span of a fruit fly, and about the same interest to it too. Things ended shortly after that, due to our polar beliefs about life in general. He thought that drinking half a bottle of vodka was a good way to spend a Saturday night, and I did not. He thought his body was gluttonous, and I felt that anorexia was not a great weight management method. For a while I thought I was in love with him, but I was really in love with the idea that I was no longer alone. I could never get over the fact the his hands were always so cold, because when we touched it never felt like we were really touching at all.
Electrons do not live complicated lives. This is mostly helped by the fact that they are not even alive to begin with. They spend endless days zipping through space with no regard for their neighbors, the weather, or time itself. They do not think, so they are unaware of the forces acting upon them, or the fact that they live eons aways from their neighbors. They are unaware that they have existed since before time began and that they will out live all the stars, even our own. They do not know love, or fear, or even know of their own existence. It might be nice to live a life that is not even a life. To have been a part of the greatest elements, to have existed as one of many in the body of someone great, to have been the subject of the experiments of Rutherford or Calvin. That would be such a fascinating life, though lonely, and you would never know it. They say that ignorance is bliss.
I wrote him a few months back. He slowly stopped sending e-mails after that last date, breaking the promise that we wouldn't lose contact. I was concerned; concerned that he had been drinking too much, concerned that he had stopped writing the poetry he used to send me, concerned that he had just given up.
A week ago I began to dream of the boy again, his figure looming above me as I feel asleep one cold January night. I had not expected him to return, and was pleased to find that he did each night. What does this mean, I find myself asking once again. Will he always follow me, leaving only when I have found someone to hold me? Maybe he is the sign, the signal that there is a love out there awaiting me. For now he is the one romantic figure in my life, the only affectionate one I have seen in some time. I do not care if he is real or not, but what matters is the fact that he cares for me. Though the hand of the phantom may never reach the crown of my head, and I may never find out who this boy is, I can at least know that someone, somewhere in the reaches of space, cares about me. We may be separated by vast distances, but the distance between the unknown and is really no further than the distance between my hands and the keys that I am typing.
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