Ben’s only a math problem.
“It’s just physics,” I say.
He looks at me. “I’ll buy in if you catch me up.”
“I said that out loud?”
He nods. Smiles.
I’ll buy in if you catch me up. No one ever wants to buy in on my thoughts or be caught up except Dad. Mom would try, but her eyes would glaze over as soon as it got too sciencey.
“Ignore me.” I put my eyes on the front of the room. Looking at Ben makes me wobbly. “I’m just on a mental EVA—an Extravehicular Activity, better known as—”
“A space walk—I know. I may be a geophysicist, but I’m not totally clueless.” And then he winks. WINKS!
“Well. That remains to be determined.”
All around us, people are talking quietly on their cushions, but I’m sure their conversations are more normal. I don’t know how to have normal conversations. I try, but I never get the references. Who has time to watch all those videos and memes? How do people keep up?
The room is small and warm and smells like cedar. I thought places like this were only for Mom and Hannah. There are seventeen people here. All college-aged, a mix. Most of them have arms covered in tattoos, but some are pretty clean-cut. I am certainly the only person wearing a vintage eighties polka-dot sweater, complete with shoulder pads.
“So.” Ben scooches closer. “You go on mental space walks?”
“Yes. Well, that’s what my dad calls it.”
“So catch me up.”
F = Gm1m2/r2
I pretend to adjust my cushion, but really I’m turning six inches into twelve inches. “Usually people just let me go on them. By myself.”
Hint. Hint.
He shifts his cushion closer, ignoring all obvious hinting. “But I want to come with. So.”
He takes my hand. It is warm. Thermodynamics. I’m not great with those equations. Yet. But that’s all it is. Heat is an energetic exchange that’s—
“Where are we going?” he asks, soft.
Ben Tamura is relentless. Typical scientist.
“I’m … I’m working on a theory. That … that…” I pull my hand away. I can’t tell him about gravity because this is NOT a date. “Human interaction can be expressed mathematically. I’ve applied Coulomb’s law to Hannah and I—the results were surprising. And it’s making me wonder if there is an equation for other things, like emotions. Grief. What is the mathematical expression of grief? Can you quantify it? And if so, can you solve it?”
He looks at his hands, frowning. At first I think he’s disappointed in this particular space walk, but I realize this is Ben’s thinking face, and I like it. I like his face. All of his faces. The whole periodic table that plays out across the valley beneath the ridge of his nose and the planets of his eyes and the craters beneath them, dark circles from late study nights and early mornings at the coffeehouse. I want to be the Neil Armstrong of Planet Ben, plant a flag.
I AM IN SO MUCH TROUBLE.
Oxytocin and vasopressin. Attachment chemicals. This is what this is. He is an evil genius, convincing me to come here, to be around him more, and now he’s not just dopey dopamine, which I could have handled, now it will hurt, it will hurt—
“You could maybe look at an equation for the moment of inertia,” he finally says. “Does grief feel like that? Like not moving?”
Wow. He … wow.
But his hypothesis is incorrect.
Losing and the fear of loss—they feel the same. So fast. Rushing. Rising and cresting until it covers you completely.
“No,” I say. “It feels like a wave.” I grab my purse. “I have to go.”
I try to stand, which is difficult when your foot has fallen asleep, and Ben is looking up at me, stricken. A question forms on his lips, but before he can ask it, before he can ask my question—Why? Why?—and I can give him his favorite words—I don’t know—a bell rings, clear and bright.
It is the sound the sun would make, if it could make a sound, when it is coming up over the horizon. Hello, Earth. Good morning. Good morning.
I am half-crouched, uncertain. I can hear my father ringing that bell in his study. It meant he was done meditating, that it was okay to knock on the door, to come in, to be together again.
Gravity expresses itself in its most familiar way: It pushes me down, back onto the cushion.
The room quiets, a quiet that thrums with expectation. Readiness. How it feels when Dad is about to lecture, and he looks out over the auditorium. Pushes up his glasses.
I pull my knees up to my chin. Ben reaches over and—just for a moment—rests his hand on my foot, on my Doctor Who sock, and squeezes. Then he lets go.
A woman is now at the front of the room, sitting on the cushion. She has the most beautiful Afro I have ever seen, like a star system, and wide-set eyes that know things. I think you only get to sit on that cushion if you know things.
Like almost everyone here, the woman is covered in tattoos. Her hands, even. When she puts her palms together, the sides read: ONLY LOVE.
“Hey, everyone. I recognize most of you, but for those of you I haven’t met, my name is River. Yes, that’s my real name, not some shit I made up to sound enlightened.”
Oh, I like her.
There is soft laughter, and she smiles. For just a moment, her eyes meet mine, and she gives me a nod.
“So, here’s the deal. We’re gonna sit. Simple—but not easy.” She shakes her head. “Contrary to popular belief, we don’t sit here to relax. To have a little time-out from our lives, do some deep breathing, and call it a night. Nope. You want that, you motherfuckers came to the wrong meditation class.” Now there’s some real laughter. “We are going to sit here with all our shit, with ourselves just as we are, and accept whatever is happening. We are going to just be. Right here, right now. Not in yesterday, thinking about the past. Not in tomorrow, thinking about the future. We are going to be here. Right now. This moment. This breath.
“You might be bored as fuck. Sit with that. You might be scared at what you see in yourself, what you feel. Sit with that. You MIT nerds among us might figure out the cure for cancer. Sit with that—and don’t write anything down until we’re done sitting.” More laughter. “Why do we do this? It’s Friday night. We could be at a party, could be binge-watching something stupid, could be kicking our roommates out of our rooms so we can study anatomy…” Ben laughs softly, and I do not like what that does to certain regions of me that shall go unnamed for reasons of discretion.
“We do this,” River says, “so we can wake up from the trance. You know what I mean, right? The trance of thinking that this”—she waves a finger around the room—“is for keeps. It’s not. It’s just a ride. Amanda Palmer said that. And it’s true. It’s just a ride. And we are missing it because we are too lost in all the shit we want to have or do or be. We miss it because we’re too busy updating our social media status and reading another article online and watching another video. And this ride? You only get one ticket—one go. Unless you have really fucking fantastic karma, if you believe in that. Most people, they get on this ride and instead of buckling in and doing this thing, they check out. Buy shit they don’t need. Live on their phone. Not us. Here, we sit so we can rock the shit out of this roller coaster.”