Uncountable Infinities
By Dominic Dayta
Your voice is still groggy with sleep when I call. You've just left the apartment, on your way to work. Across the line I hear the deadbolt click shut, the playful squeak of your leather shoes against the linoleum floor on the hallway, and the elevator bell's beckoning ring. Right now I'm in Ortigas, getting on a red-eye train ride headed home, to the same elevator bell, to the same squeaky floor, to the same locks on the door. Only you won't be there.
On the train, I close my eyes and count the diminishing distance between us. Right now you're on the bus: I can hear the jangle of coins in your purse as you put together your fare. I pretend that I'm sitting beside you, watching you count your change, laughing at how slow it takes you to sum up a five and seven one-peso coins. I say I've never seen a professional mathematician be this bad in math. I think of all the many times I've seen you struggle with counting money and it brings a laugh to my tired jaws, lights up my heavy eyes. After all the actuarial exams you've passed and the research papers you've put out, you still can't do the one math people actually use.
I ask if you've had breakfast and you say no. I ask, if you don't mind, maybe we can meet halfway – in Cubao, maybe – and have breakfast at some café, or maybe just coffee if you don't have much time. It's six am. At eight, you'll be reporting at the office, for a presentation you're giving for the corporate executives. You've polished the material days before and you've got the numbers down to heart (sure you fail with coins and bills, but with means and standard errors you can always be trusted); maybe, just maybe, you could spare a little time.
You ask if I'm okay and at the coffee shop in Cubao I tell you that I miss you, and how it could be that I miss so much the person sitting just across the table, the person I sleep next to at night over the weekends. How it feels like I'm seeing the glisten of your gelled-up hair, or smelling your cologne like it's the first time in weeks, in months, in years. How the closest person feels like the farthest.
In my head, I plot the distance between us on a horizontal axis. I am a function gradually running along the number line, closing the distance between us. But you are an asymptote, and no matter how close I get, I can't get close enough. The space between us only seems to open up under our feet the more I try to cross it, moving us farther and farther still.
I know what you're going to say because you've said it before: that's it going to be fine, in a matter of time, we'll have our rotation at the call center again, I'll be reassigned to the morning shift, and we won't have to live like we're on different time zones anymore. Count the days, you say. Count the distance. Count the hours. Count everything: it's a numbers game you devised as a child when your parents split up. The numbers turn tragedies into statistics, so you claim. Turn everything into numbers and somehow the hurt just goes away.
Believe me, I've tried. How many times have I sat in traffic counting the remaining hours until I came home to the smell of your shirt? How many times have I counted the distance between us, even converted them to meters, to kilometers, to miles, in hopes of finding a figure that would convince me you're not so far away? I have counted everything. I have added and subtracted and multiplied. I’ve taken square roots and cube roots, sines and cosines. Maybe I am doing it wrong.
There is no arithmetic to the longing heart, to whom seconds become years, and meters expand into lightyears. There is no containing the void that grows in the absence of a smile, of a laugh, of a whisper. The heart’s longing is an uncountable infinity: bounded between rib cage and spinal cord, and yet, like all the real numbers situated in the distance between 0 and 1, between absence and presence, is an elusive innumerable, a hall of mirrors.
Nonsense, you snap, we are not that far away - if we are, then why can I do this? You reach over the plates and take both my hands in yours. I shiver at your warm touch - at how familiar and alien it is at the same time. But it calms my nerves, and I take in a long, deep breath.
I anchor myself onto your hand, squeezing it once, twice, repeatedly needing to reassure my security within your grasp. Seen through the windows, the city, now waking up, transforms itself into a looming monstrosity. The windows glittered across the faces of rising skyscrapers become a thousand eyes keeping watch on us. You’re smiling at me, oblivious to the sentinels outside waiting to strike, and deaf to the sonic boom beating of this terrified heart.
See? You say, everything's okay, and I nod with a smile. I stop counting and focus on that one sentence instead. And everything does feel okay, despite knowing all too well that it's a minor victory, that after breakfast you’ll be gone once more, and tonight when I wake up before leaving for work, you'll be asleep; even beside me in bed, you’re still infinitely far away. But I put all that out of my mind, for now.
Until the numbers start adding up again, I guess this is the best I can ask for.
Let’s eat, you say, pointing at my pancakes, your voice still groggy with sleep.
THE END