Particles, mass and entropy

I was born into silence.

My mother bore me to her grave.

I would tell you that she was a wonderful woman, that her eyes sparkled as she told me stories of world smaller than my smallest fingertip, and places bigger than I could ever imagine. I would tell you that her laugh was musical, that she smelled of jasmine in spring, lavender in winter, the ocean in summer, and my father in autumn. I would tell you these things, but I never knew her.
 

My father would bring books home to me. He hoped that I would learn more from the souls of dead trees than his dead soul could ever teach me. He was known as a physicist to everyone but me. He knew more about the universe than I could ever understand, but couldn’t understand how I could sit and weep my soul into the pages of the worlds I longed to join.

He would sometimes sit at my mother’s old piano. He never learned to play, although he knew all the theory. He could tell me how each string was tightened, what the string was made of, down to its anatomical structure and how aging and use changed this through entropy. He could tell me how the quality of timber would change the reverberations and therefore change the subtle resonances in pitch. He could give me the history of the old ivory keys, the inhumane processes in elephantine slaughter in districts in India and Africa. He knew of all the classical composers, mostly from Baroque, but also from the German Enlightenment, British Romantics, and the Pre-Revolution French movements. I'll bet he could even read music. But he never played. He would just sit, tracing his fingers over the keys that my mother once caressed so passionately.

A silent attempt at claiming back what entropy had stolen from him.

 
He never blamed me for her death.

He would look into my eyes and tell me he loved me with all the forces of the universe, and I could believe him.

Love is a strange thing. My father told me that 'you can never choose who you fall in love with'.
I wondered if he had studied this, whether there was a mathematical equation, a formula hidden in the deep recesses of his office, or else his mind, that spoke of this truth.

Sometimes though, when I looked at him compared with photographs of my beauty of a mother, the most unlikely coupling, I wasn’t so sure.

 
The first man I loved was just that. A man. Forty one. Much too old for a seventeen year old girl, with illusions of everlasting romance.

He was the one who taught me that space and time were relative, that time went slower as you moved faster. He gave me many things, gifts, I suppose you could call them. Pieces of life, to be tucked away into the yellowed pages of the books my father had given me. I gave him pieces of myself in return. The inside of my legs, the nape of my neck, my incisor teeth. Though I kept them on my person, the insides were hollowed out, and all of me that once filled them was replaced with him. With the pull of his rough hands, the knowledge that seemed so far from my own reach, with the way his eyes lingered on me when it appeared I wasn’t aware. He taught me how to love, in most senses of the word.

He also taught me that love, like space and time, was relative. That it wasn’t eternal.

I didn’t cry when he left. The small parts of me that belonged to him would ache every now and then, but I could convince myself they were made of stone, that the pain I felt was only a memory, it wasn’t real.
 

My father saw a lot of things that I did not. Like the particles that hide in the centre of atoms, he chose to keep them hidden.

‘In their own time, they’ll make themselves known.’

I think he practised this theory with me. Though sometimes, I wished he didn’t.
 

It was then that I fell in love with silence.

I loved the way that even the smallest things could seem so powerful, if only given the right stage.

My father brought home a book on gravity, and I fell in love with the author. He was from my hometown, so I sought him out. 

My father saw my intentions, with the clarity that had revealed particles of light, and introduced me to his son. He watched us shake hands with a glint in his eye and turned away.
 

This boy was soft. Not so much small as breakable. Tender. I taught him how to stand tall. He taught me how to see the stars. 

He gave me his eyes, and the world took on colours I had only read about. I gave him my lips, the hollow of my neck, the inside of my elbow, my lungs.

He was so small that I didn’t know if he could carry all that I gave him.

But the smallest things are the strongest, I think. The lightest things, not weighed down by anything, are the ones that can resist gravity. They resist the pull of a whole planet, spinning as to draw each particle closer to its core.

And it’s the tiny things, the weightless things that can do it.

He made me weightless.
 

But after a while, mass accumulates.  Gravity pulls, and life fails. I broke his nose as he left.

He broke my heart.
 

I wish I had fallen in love with a songbird instead.

For one summer and one winter I would have given my heart away.

When death came I would know that may heart would fade to silence.
 

But, as my father says, ‘things rarely turn out the way you expect them to.’

He engraved it on his heart, next to the melody of my mother, next to the formula that he was convinced would one day bring her back to him.