The professor’s hands came out of his jacket pockets and gestured, palms up, in sync with his prolonged sigh. “Why are you here? Why did you take this class?” His tone and half-smile appeared sincere—his blue eyes looking into the back of hers suggested that he did, indeed, want a direct answer born from her squirming toes, and not from the rehearsed answers neatly packed into her side pocket.

Will she tell him that the universe stopped expanding that day?

Does she say that she is here so that she might continue breathing?

That she is riding the tidal surge that is racing to the precipice and that she is rowing as fast as she can to hurry up the plunge?

Her dark eyes followed him as he paced, deliberately, to accentuate his words. Exclamation points, question marks, with each footstep across the front of the classroom. His glances over the tops of their heads rode his questions that floated to the back wall and bounced back into the silence. No one responded.

Squirming ever so slightly, avoiding contact, she looked without looking into the non-space between his feet and hers. The questions he hurled were not new to her, nor, she imagined, to any of the other students who willingly came to spill their souls. To find voice, to utter, to speak. To put past or future tense into the present. To wrap up the sphere of splintered edges into a smoother ball that she could hold at arm’s length without ripping her flesh.

Syntax

She enjoyed playing with the order of words to change meaning. Just a slight movement to create a new message, like the movement of an eyebrow, the flick of a chin.

Her feet were cold so she pulled the end of her flowered flannel nightgown over her toes. Warmed, it made a difference.

Were her feet cold?

Her feet were cold.

Interrogative versus declarative. But what was cold? Her feet? The air?

Quantum

Everything only had meaning, maybe even form, as it interfaced with something else. Such as time, itself fluid. She knew time shifted in relationship to mass, gravity, to movement. She thought of the half-understood articles on quantum theory she had recently read: the effects of observation, of her, on the behavior of energy. Effects on reality.

Order

Was that why numbers had always been so comforting? So appealing? Seeking, applying, presenting some order within formulas on and off the page? When she was young, grade-school age, on a day-long ski trip with her family, she would sit in the back seat of their warm sedan, heading to the snowy Sierra. She was small, so she would look up and out the chilled glass of the side window, and see the metal or wooden road signs above her. Was she just entertaining her family by reading the road signs, aloud, backwards, or did she have an undeveloped sense of left-to-right visual tracking, or did she understand, at 8 years of age, that everything was fluid, the order of things fluid, order to be applied as needed?

And so numbers established some structure in her mercurial space. In an otherwise swirling up/down, right/left universe of signs read backwards to an entertained immediate family, impressed by a misunderstood skill.

Pieces of the Moon

She remembered the shapes and shadows and edges. She did not hear any sounds, the moon being almost 239,000 miles away. Almost ten times the circumference of our earth. She was standing in the cool night under an ordinary and extraordinary starry sky. She often would look at the moon, reflecting the sun’s energy, and try to make out the dark part of the sphere. Or just admire the orb, grateful for our satellite, feeling a connection. So she was looking at her moon and then it happened:

The full moon, her beautiful glowing moon, started to crack, started to break apart. It cracked into large, unequal pieces. The huge jagged pieces, maybe three or four, began to separate from each other, slowly, distinctly. The shadows in the gigantic crevices grew as the pieces slowly let go of each other. The craters still visible, the glowing and shadows still there, the pieces began to slowly topple downwards.

Perhaps she could catch them. Their weight would just add to the unfathomable weight she was carrying. Had the universe, indeed, stopped expanding? Did the rupture in her life effect distant galaxies or just her inner universe? Had her son been the one who’d held the moon in the sky? Or had the moon just split into huge irregular chunks of light? And that’s all.

Through some rearrangement of order, a change in syntax, or some new-found universal fluidity, she might enter another realm. She would welcome the falling chunks of broken sphere and they might act like a silent pile driver and drive her waiting arms, attached to her waiting body, into the center of the earth, warm and dark.

Present Tense

So she raises her hand, her glistening eyes meet his, and she answers his questions with a nod. Yes, she is there to summon the truths in her squirming toes, to hold the pen in her hand, to move the tongue in her mouth, to utter, to make some sense while the moon cracks, while signs are read backwards, while time marches in relation to stillness, while wave functions collapse, and she stands on top of the earth’s crust.