Logic Beach: Part I

by Exurb1a

Writing a book is rather like tequila shots. Fun at first, then almost immediately a horrific chore you barely remember starting.

We shared a bed, shared a bathroom, shared a toothbrush sometimes. You stopped wearing perfume so often and I stopped combing my hair. And slowly (though I can’t point to exactly when) we gave up flirting down tin-can telephones and came out into the daylight of real living and took a good long look at each other and shrugged and went off into the future.

Right, I said, and what about the millions of people communism killed last century? Oh, you said. That was people, not communism.

He parried all the hostility like some expert martial artist and I had to forcefully step in to stop myself liking him accidentally.

You told me once that all of time was ‘simultaneous’, mathematically speaking, that as far as the universe was concerned, everything was happening all at once. I’m still not sure I understand what that means, but I tried to feel you in that chair.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said, which was not a lie. The matter is private and I’m investigating it.

I cannot bring myself to believe that it was all for nothing, even if everything is for nothing anyway. I cannot bring myself to believe that screwing in that field, or our marriage, or all those quiet Sunday afternoons together were just a phase matter went through, and then wandered off to be a rock or a shoe instead. You took fourteen billion years to make, and you won't happen again. Your ghost is everywhere now.