A Memoir That Isn't

"One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory."--Rita Mae Brown

"Romantic" wasn't quite the way to describe the first time Joe asked me out. If romance involves technicalities, it didn't even qualify as a date. I was barely out of high school, a certified social misfit, and surely the fact that he invited me to come see movies¹ with him on Valentine's Day had no bearing on the matter. By the stereotype approximation, I reckoned that, as a physics major to my math², he must be almost as socially clueless as I was.

I was right.

Poets and philosophers have pondered the mysteries of love, its sublime delights and unspeakable griefs. No poet, I; I was infatuated with a guy who looked like an 8th grader except when he forgot to shave (which he managed with unerring regularity); who drew spaceships and Archimedean solids³ in the margins of his notes; who did all his homework the day before it was due yet aced his classes. For my part, facial hair was a non-issue, I drew unicorns and Sierpinski gaskets,⁴ and as for the homework...oh well, can't have everything.

We played board games together, shared dinners where the conversations consisted of my awkward questions and his amiable, monosyllabic answers, and shared activities that only socially clueless geeks would think to share. I became intimately familiar with Joe's posture when he played Quake and his uneven I-can-almost-break-lightspeed gait when he walked me to class. As for me--it never occurred to me that, as I learned his quirks, he was learning mine.

Time to a physics major is quantifiable, a thing to be poured into units for convenience.⁵ Time to a math major is something that physics majors worry about, for math majors prefer to avoid the real world and hide behind thickets of abstraction. Time to someone with a crush, though, has a different face, passing in a tumble of where-is-he? and there-he-is and I-hope-I'll-see-him-soon.

In movies, portentous moments are heralded by appropriate music. Life, alas, doesn't provide such handy cues. I suspected nothing when I went to his dorm one humid spring evening. It had become a routine: I would sit on his bed and do homework, Joe would play computer games until the last minute, and we would fill in the gaps by discussing science fiction novels and spacecraft design.⁶

Joe broke the routine. "I've been thinking about something..." (His sentences rarely ended, but sort of trailed off.)

I still didn't see it coming. "Like what?"

I'd seen him grin, and I'd seen him scowl at recalcitrant integrals--but never before had I seen that half-way, half-expectant smile, as if it were transmuting into a mask by half-lives. "I think I have a crush on you," he said.

Sometimes silence is an answer. And sometimes silence is just a symptom of a short-circuited brain. I spent the next 15 minutes babbling--in gestures, not words. I can only imagine what poor Joe made of my bewilderment.

In the hours that followed I must have found words, must have expressed a clumsy I-have-a-crush-on-you-too, must have stopped the exponential decay of that half-wary, half-expectant smile and changed it with an alchemist's touch into a real smile. I'll never know. The short-circuit extends to my memory; to this day I can't remember the rest of that evening.

If Joe remembers, he's not telling--but he hasn't complained, either.

footnotes

¹ Animé, actually, but that's even further from a date. [ back ]

² Well, I thought I'd major in history or computer science and only declared math a year later, but let's not complicate the story. [ back ]

³ Spheres, cubes and cones aren't, but if I'm a math major I ought to get some mileage out of the intimidating terminology. [ back ]

⁴ More often Menger sponges, but that sounds more like a sessile ocean creature than a mathematical construct. [ back ]

⁵ I could insert lofty remarks on Riemannian spacetime geometry, but I shall refrain. [ back ]

⁶ Specifically, weapons systems for inclusion on spacecraft. Physics majors can be dangerous, take it from me. [ back ]

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