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#a freak snow storm and cancelled flight tried to derail this story
vox-ex · 2 years
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The Accidental Poetry Of Physics
For @red-priestess-of-scully-romanov and the @argo-city-exchange 
Kara and Lena fall in love hard and fast but it takes them time and physics and poetry to realize it...What choices will it take?
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This is no ordinary story. In this story, the outcome depends on the decisions you make. Think carefully about your choices, as they will affect how the story ends.
You're quiet, and clumsy, and definitely a little hopeless, according to your sister.
You always wanted to be a writer, wanted to find words to explain the way the world feels.
You had to grow up too fast. Had to say goodbye to too many people too many times.
It should have made you stop believing in happy endings.
But still, you wanted to fall in love.
You fell in love at least once.
It was the kind of love that makes your stomach woozy and your head a little fuzzy. The kind of love that makes you say all the wrong things at all the wrong times, but she still smiles at you anyway.
Her name was Lena.
You see her every night in the campus library for weeks before you finally come up with a plan to talk to her.
It's 4 am, and it's just you and her and a couple of other wayward students. You buy her coffee and place it on the table when she finally steps away, leaving a note with a call number hastily scribbled underneath before you can talk yourself out of it.
Five minutes later, you watch as she peeks around the corner of the stacks, steps quiet, and hands wrapped protectively around the cup in her hands, her movements somewhere between cautious and curious. But when she finally sees you standing there, she smiles, hands relaxing to take a sip of her coffee as she tilts her head just a little.
"Slavic literature?"
You nod and pull a small blue book from the shelf and pass it to her, watching as she flips through the pages to get to the last clue...page 31.
Her smile widens when she sees the title. You smile back when she starts to read it aloud, and you get to hear for the first time the gentle lilting accent she can't keep hidden in the rhythm of the words.
The hour from night to day. The hour from side to side. The hour for those past thirty.
The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks. The hour when earth betrays us. The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars. The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.
The hollow hour. Blank, empty. The very pit of all other hours.
No one feels good at four in the morning. If ants feel good at four in the morning –three cheers for the ants. And let five o'clock come if we're to go on living.
You learn a lot about Lena in that library.
You lean that she is quiet in her own way. That she grew up too fast too, faster maybe even than you.
You learn that she is getting her PhD, that she wants to be a scientist, that she wants to explain how the world works so we can be better at fixing it — better at helping people.
You share more poems with her, start to pair them with songs on homemade mixtapes.
She teaches you about the theories of the universe and shows you constellations on nights when it's dark enough.
You fall in love with her hard and fast — the way poets dare, and particles collide.
You want to think she loves you too.
But you never get the chance to know.
She leaves before you can tell her.
You give her one more tape.
Hope it can say the things you couldn't.
You don't know if she ever listens to it.
You don't suppose it matters.
But you think of it from time to time.
Until the titles of the poems started to fade.
Until the lyrics of the songs no longer got stuck on a loop in your head.
Until two days ago, when a letter slips free from the mail wedged between your arm and the takeout container in your hands as you fumble to get your keys into the lock.
You stare down at the slightly crumpled edges, at the grease smeared across the corner from the bag of Chinese food. It's been almost four years since you saw the handwriting on the envelope, the neat print strung together in elaborate equations rather than in simple letters of your name.
To pick up the letter, go to the next page...
Alex says she's a bad driver. And Kara wants to disagree with her. But she also concedes the possibility there might be a reason why none of her friends allow her to borrow their car to drive almost 3,000 miles on an impromptu road trip. So instead, it's by way of an overcrowded connecting flight in Chicago and one too many cups of lukewarm coffee that she finds herself first on the sidewalks of Metropolis and then greeted by a very nice, if not, slightly confused-looking man in the lobby of Lena's building. And Kara isn't sure whether it's that she's there to see Lena, or just her obvious out-of-placeness, which he finds more confounding.
It's only once she's on the way up to the apartment, that her palms start to feel sweaty, that she can feel her heart begin to flutter in her chest. Everything up until that moment hadn’t quite felt real. But now she’s starting to wonder how long she can reasonably wait in the hall while Lena thinks she's just gotten lost. Because she just needs a minute. Needs to convince herself that it's foolish to feel this way, foolish to feel so nervous over seeing her again. After all, they only knew each other for a year. It's silly. This whole thing is silly. She should just leave, go back down, go back to National City, and forget that Lena's letter ever came. So why then does it feel like it matters so much? And that's the question. That's always been the question.
The elevator stops. The doors slide open. But the hallway she had been expecting them to open onto, isn’t a hallway at all. Just a brightly lit apartment. And she has no plausible reason for turning back now. No way to even say she's knocked on the wrong door. And while she's busy trying to convince herself of just how silly this all is and how weird it is that anyone wouldn't even have a door to knock on, all of a sudden, Lena is just there. Four years and two cramped plane rides later, she's just there — all pressed white shirt and neat black slacks with an expensive-looking watch and heels that are too tall to possibly be comfortable. And for a moment, it's as if Kara can't figure out which Lena is real, the one in front of her or the one from her memories. So, she tries to picture her instead in a soft wool sweater with threadbare cuffs just long enough for her to tuck her hands into. She imagines them side by side, a glossy magazine cover next to a grainy polaroid taken in the low light of the library late at night. And she can't help but wonder briefly how different she must look too. How much she must have changed. She wonders what image of herself Lena held onto in her head, wonders if she held onto her at all.
"It's good to see you, Kara."
To step into the apartment, go to the next page...
Kara steps forward into the room and immediately can't decide what to do with her hands.
Do they hug?
They used to hug.
Do they shake hands?
Gosh, that'd be weird.
Not any weirder than just standing there staring at her, Kara.
She settles for smiling and raising her hand in an awkward little wave that might actually be the most awkward thing she's ever done.
"It's good to see you, too."
But then Lena smiles back at her, and it's the same smile still, eyes glittering with the same joy, and just a hint of mischievousness, and Kara is so wrapped up in the way it feels, so caught up in the way her heart thumps inside of her chest that she almost doesn't see what Lena's been holding in her hands.
It's still in the same case, with the same crack along one edge from where she dropped it onto the sidewalk of the departure terminal when she tried to pull it out of her bookbag.
"You still have it."
Kara stares at her with awe, but Lena just looks down at the tape deck in her hands, thumb running across the surface like a well-practiced pattern.
"I have something for you."
And she smiles again, but this time it's softer, quieter. The kind of smile they used to share when words felt too heavy, but you still needed to know everything was okay.
Kara follows her into another room, catching glimpses here and there of the person Lena is now before they're standing in front of a small bookshelf. Lena has to reach up just a little to get it, tipping the top of the spine out first and then carefully pulling it down. Kara watches as she traces a finger along the edge, counting the small tabs at the top to make sure they're all still there.
"I wanted you to see this," Lena tells her, pulling one of the tabs up a little higher than the others to mark the page and holds it out toward Kara.
To open the book, go to the next page...
Kara takes the book from Lena's hands, holding it carefully in her own as if she's afraid it might just fall apart.
And really, it's just a simple paperback book, the binding a little creased; it's clearly a copy that has been well-loved by someone, and its pale yellow and amber cover is a little faded from the sunlight of whatever bookshop window it may have spent its life in before finding a home here.
She finds the paper marking between the pages, and her fingers carefully slide between them, opening the book to the words that all at once become familiar again.
Lena touches the book gently, "Do you remember that night on the roof of the library?" she asks.
And, of course, she does. It was the night she decided she was going to tell Lena she loved her. It was the night she made the tape Lena was still holding in her hand. But she doesn't tell her that part.
"Of course."
She remembers sitting underneath the stars on a blanket stolen from Lena's roommate, Sam. She remembers Lena's hands tracing patterns in the sky as she talked about stories hidden in the stars, and the pull of black holes, and how every particle is connected. Kara remembers falling even more in love with her, falling even more in love with the idea of falling in love with her. Then she remembers going home and finding a poem by June Jordan:
There is no chance that we will fall apart There is no chance There are no parts.
She read it over and over, letting the sound of 'Ladies and Gentleman We Are Floating in Space' play through half-broken speakers until she had recorded them both as the last track on the last tape she would ever make for anyone.
Because then two days later, Lena's father died.
And three days after that, Kara held her hand at the funeral.
And by the following week, she and Lena were on opposites sides of the country.
She was supposed to give her the tape.
They were supposed to listen to it together.
She was supposed to tell her she loved her.
But instead, Kara pressed the tape into Lena's hands in a hasty airport goodbye, a number and an address etched on the plastic of the case in place of all the things she left unsaid between them. An unspoken promise to come if she ever needed her to replace the unspoken words she didn’t get to tell her.
And so that's what Kara supposes she is doing there with June Jordan's poem in hands again, sitting on a couch worth more than her rent — because a promise is a promise and, a little bit she thinks, because she still believes in the accidental poetry of physics.
There is no chance that we will fall apart There is no chance There are no parts.
To believe in the accidental poetry of physics, go to the next page...
Lena sits down next to her on the couch, close enough that if Kara moves just a little, their knees would be touching.
Kara tries to remember when the last time she felt so close to someone was.
Lena is the only one she can think of.
"I didn't know what to do."
Lena closes her eyes.
"I didn't know what to do. But I didn't want to leave; I need you to know that I didn't want to leave."
She shakes her head a little.
And all of a sudden, she looks four years younger, and your heart is beating four times faster.
"But I just got to in my own head. I mean, you know how dangerous of a place that can be?"
And Kara laughs a little at that.
"Yeah, it could be a little scary from time to time."
"The night of the funeral, I was just lying awake, and you were in next room, and I don't know if it was something about being back in my old bedroom, or, or if it was just everything else, but I started thinking about all the different things in my life that had happened to get to that moment and everything that was going to happen because of that moment. I started to think about the me whose father didn't die, who got to stay with you instead; I started to think about the me whose mother never died at all, who grew up far away from all of this."
Lena's hands gesture out to the sides and toward every expanse of white wall and white counter and lack of color that fills her apartment.
"Everything was going to change, and you were so kind and so good, and the world that I was about to be a part of was everything you weren't. And I thought that maybe, maybe in this version of the universe, I just didn't get to have you. But it was okay, it was okay because just like there was a universe out there where I got to grow up with my mother in Ireland, there was a universe where I got to stay with you on that roof, and I got to have you, and I got to love you. And somehow, I convinced myself that was enough."
Kara looks down at her hands, folds them in her lap to stop them from reaching out to Lena like she always used to.
It’s so much, there’s so much.
"So you think we just found each other in the wrong universe? That that there are other versions of you and other versions of me that got to fall in love.?"
Lena shrugs like she's asked herself this question so many times already that maybe it's stopped making sense.
"There had to be at least one, I mean, by the law of averages, there had to be at least one."
But Kara tries to make it make sense — to the past version of herself and this one.
"So we're not together because of the multiverse?"
"Yeah."
And when Kara looks at her, all she sees is how much weight that one word carries, how much Lena wants to believe that she is worthy of love, and yet accepts a universe in which that love always exists just out of reach.
"But then I found your tapes again."
And they both smile a little at that.
"I could never bring myself to listen to the last one. I think a part of me felt that it belonged to that other you and me. But then I finally got to the last track, and as soon as you read that poem, it felt so familiar. I listened to it over and over, trying to place it. And then I remembered. "
Lena points at the book of poems still in Kara's hands.
"The first night I was alone, and I-I missed you so much, I missed you, and instead of calling you, I found the first bookshop I could and wandered right into the poetry section and bought that book."
Lena traces her finger over the words of the first line.
There is no chance that we will fall apart
"And maybe it's a coincidence, or maybe its two particles shouting at each other through space, but I let myself believe that maybe those words belonged to us the whole time. That maybe the universe we fall in love in can be this one after all."
She pauses, takes a deep breath, tries to push down all the emotions rushing forward.
"And I can't help but think that I've realized this all too late. That I'm still wrong. But you're here, and I figured if you came, then at least, that meant there was still a chance I wasn't too late."
To fall in love in this universe, go to the next page...
Kara realizes she hasn't said anything. But in her defense, Lena has never rambled like that before, not when she was sleep deprived from too much studying, not even when she tried to drink her sister under the table for some reason. Kara was the rambler. The one who thought that maybe if she just spoke fast enough, it could make the world feel like it stopped spinning for just a second. But now, Kara begs for the world to do anything but a standstill.
So she does the only she can think of to force it into motion.
She makes a choice.
She leans in.
"It's not too late"
And when Lena finally kisses her, with one hand pressed against her jaw and the other drawing her in even closer, every touch feels somehow like a memory, like it's something they've done before. And maybe that means Lena was right, maybe there's another universe where they kissed after that night on the roof, maybe that means that this moment too will remain, a memory of human love stretching through time and space to be carried on the backs of particles unbound by the limits of human nature — she can't imagine anything more poetic than that.
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