Spacetime Is Defined as Any Mathematical Model
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Artwork by Katherine Han, age 17
the last boy who gave you an equation of a heart on valentine’s day went home crying so here is my proposal of the second-best confession
Spacetime is defined as any mathematical model which
fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension
of time into a single four-dimensional manifold. In another
inkstain: A warp of spacetime away, I am the bird perched
on your shoulder but it was your weight on me, your gravity
tying my claws to your shoulder. Newton’s third law states that
every action must have a reaction, but the bruises in my throat
from hoarding your name lead me nowhere. All I remember:
Numerous functions scattered across the blackboard, x’s and
y’s criss-crossed together until they were reaching limits,
euler’s number printed in the very center like a sun and
everything else were planets and stars, breaking exponentials
to reach a complexity undefined by four quatrains. Sometimes
when I close my eyes I dream about university lectures with you,
look down and my fingertips ashened with white chalk and
all the equations I couldn’t bring myself to solve because you see,
it’s all one big metaphor: I am a bird trapped inside an hourglass
that is time, beating against the glass until my feathers are
sticky with blood. The modern Icarus. I fling myself toward
the light in the distance and I fling myself in the direction of
your eyes but time and space are not tapestries like we were taught
in school; they are solid tesseracts and I am but a caged bird.
The speed of light is constant regardless of the frame of
reference in which it is measured; the distances of event pairs
change when measured in different inertial frames of reference
because of the relativity of simultaneity. I think the cruelest
part about all of this is that the glass is not stained, not even
rose-colored — because then I would have an excuse to be
illusioned — no, the glass is crisp clear. There are colors I could
only see with you. On the glass there’s no fingerprint because
you fill me up with so much melancholy that I turn non-human,
and yet I’ve never understood the point of being human better
than the first moment we met. A pyre of light, and I was the
fallen ruins, waiting to become stardust in your iron veins —
the summer of 2017, you were walking down the hallway and
you said my name. I had, and still have, no idea how you knew
who I was. The air smelled like thyme. In the fourth dimension
the linear additivity of velocities no longer holds true. If there
was something I was glad to have happened in this escape, it
would’ve been you — standing next to me, with bird bodies that
turned into ghosts; you, being my dying wish. Einstein
suggested that birds may have used quantum physics in their
migration process. Einstein’s last words were German
words spoken to a nurse who didn’t know German at all.
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Fifi Wang is a high school junior who enjoys reading fiction in her free time, especially to relieve stress. She believes that literature is a vital fragment of sanity in her life.