Particles: A Love Story
The theoretical physicist John Bell found that we can’t tear entangled photons apart. Even in region and space, particles can be so intimate, they influence each other from a distance.
It’s as unlikely as the things we did at first: to the farmers market for cinnamon buns, last year’s spring grass and tunnels of rock we scampered through just a little bit high, and secret love notes in bed, the resonance of your voice while stacking wood in the yard, Patsy Cline, and how we woke on the sofa in the afternoon with the DJ’s voice representative of time, place, your hands on my neck and waist.
I remember the blue dress I wore, an open back with a show of skin toward the curve of my ass. Elegant I thought, clung to the hips, a shade of blue like gas fire or sapphire. Blue poppy. I wanted you to take it off me.
We poured glasses of wine. The shades pulled except for one window open. It was summer, early still, without smoke and fire, cool enough toward evening for a post of air to settle onto our bare legs. We didn’t know what the neighbors had in store. Nor did we, though they must have heard us, remarked on the nature of our celebration, a revelation of love unfolding in the hours to follow. Should we always hear this kind of tune outside our windows. How might the world be, if all the openings in our homes voiced the lover’s call as we walked our dogs to the park?
I brought chili in a pot, the folk singer melody unimportant to the scene, but his voice elevated the room, like sheets of chorus sung onto our arms and shoulders. At night, when I can’t sleep, you say, “Don’t close the door, baby, so we can still be together.” I know the summer can’t hold the impression of our bodies forever, our desire evoking the fritillaria, spruce, the anise swallowtail, all provisional accordance. To be done at some time.
No matter. We are but quarks and hybrid composites, momentary illuminations. Some charming mixture that will become decay, but for now, our bodies radiate dark matter, up above meadows and over beaches stretched platinum under the moon, no one near, with a fire burning along the seam. I’ll know later—this new physics—that when I step toward my home porch and notice a broken pencil on the grass or the vine shaking against my window, that even across the mountains, you’ll also know my movement.
How improbable it all is, in a universe with phenomena and spectacle and tragedy. Entanglement, as love rebellion, as impossible possibility, said Einstein. I do not believe him. Turn to me in that moon, shattered behind the clouds, tell me as the glimmer breaks us, that you could look at me 4,000 times a day and never be bored.
It’s something like thermodynamics. You said that first. We looked it up. We searched for some definition of love, a perpetual engine that turns us, an impossible machine held with frenzy and vision.
Is it enough to let memory craft the explanation? I remember the way I took you home, that first time, and later, the pancakes on your mother’s table, I’ll never meet her, the warm syrup and my hand across the table, nervous with love, and those cottonwoods and lilacs shuddering in your backyard, the mountain bluebirds and house wrens awake at their branches, busy with their own agreements. I’d later suggest you mow the weeds in August, even after we mended our first quarrel in the cemetery with the thunder and the dead watching the highway, handsome in the gray light.
What I come to understand is that nothing is more revolutionary than this joy: the specificity of sensation felt in your body is different than mine, but also tied, joined, and when we share in a space of affection, it percusses. We might remark on this joy and others: those stars bending over us in the manner of their light or the departed flutter of the swallowtail, how to wish for those slight wings to clap my nose, just like that, the lightest of any feeling, barely. My daughter, slightly beholden to her concern of the dark arts, so amused with purple gems and tarot cards, her ripped tights and wit. Soda Mountain, and even the corner house with daisies and the man who tends them, a thing to do.
And this: our bodies as provenance, a kind of home, breaking all the rules as theoretical possibility, and like particles, we’ll show up and perform as a pair who associates between the manzanita and sugar pines, if only for now.
