I had been tearing my hair out over my final project for physics. The assignment was as irritatingly vague as it was intriguing: measure something. I’d changed my topic three times since midterms and was still searching for the right thing.
Coming home from Will’s the other morning, I’d gotten off at 33rd Street and walked over to the High Line, hoping a coffee and some fresh air would clear my head, that some bolt of inspiration would strike since I was getting down to the wire.
It was a sunny morning, with a chill still in the air, and I was in a well-fucked, under-caffeinated trance, my eye catching on the smallest details. The way tiny ruffs of new plants were pushing their way through the spaces between the metal slats. How at that exact moment the scaffolding on a nearby building cast a shadow at a perfect perpendicular to the pink edge of the mural I was walking past.
A bench where, from my angle of approach it looked like a man sat alone. When I walked five steps closer, though, I saw that the breadth of his body had completely hidden the woman sitting with him. They were looking at each other with a kind of absorption that made me soften my steps because it felt intrusive to even stir the air around them, to cause vibrations from my footfalls that would reach them. As I walked by, though, they both glanced up at me and smiled. Like the joy they shared was large enough to include me, and the plants, and the shadows, and everything around them.
I smiled back and lifted my coffee in a toast, not just to them but to the High Line and the river and the traffic, and the whole goddamned beautiful city around us. I was so giddy with it that for a moment, grin wrinkling my whole face, I made the kind of sound that’s completely embarrassing outside of, like, a movie musical or an episode of Glee.
It was a perfect moment. So perfect that I found myself almost frantically trying to catalog it. To break it down to its component parts so I could re-create it. But as I tried to measure it—to make it reducible to some kind of system or law—it slipped away.
And that was my problem. Measure something. All the things that truly mattered were immeasurable. Using any system of quantification currently in existence, anyway. And I wanted to do something meaningful, otherwise, what was the point?
I’d tried to think of ways to measure everything important in my life. And god knew Milton had given me enough shit about it, singing that damn song from Rent about measuring a life until I actually wondered if the professor had ever needed to ban its lyrics from being the titles of final projects.
In an admittedly sappy moment—though I consoled myself that sappiness and science were not necessarily opposed by thinking of Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan—I’d even tried to think through how I would measure love.
I’d been in the physics lab scribbling ideas in my notebook when Max, one of the grad students came in. Max had intimidated me when I first started at the lab. He was tall and muscular, and I heard someone say he was ex-military. He narrowed his eyes when he listened closely, which made it look like he doubted what you were saying, and though he was taller than everyone in the lab, he never inclined his head when he spoke to people, which gave him the impression of being even taller. But he was wicked good at physics and clearly loved it.
So when he asked what I was working on, I posed the question, though I imagined he’d probably laugh in my face.
“Do you think it’s possible to… measure love?”
He cocked his head, eyes sharp. “Didn’t they do that in that Christopher Nolan movie? Interstellar?”
“Oh, I dunno, I didn’t see it.”
He squinted at me and then leaned over the lab table, tapping my notebook.
“Well, you can’t measure something unless we can agree on what it actually is, which is a problem, since love is abstract… but, okay, let’s see. Maybe we can’t measure it directly, but we could measure its effects, like with entropy. Love… people do some crazy-ass shit for love,” he mused, gaze fixed on the wall above my head.
I knew Max had a wife and a baby daughter—he’d shown me their picture on his phone one day, with soft eyes and a private smile. I wondered if he was thinking about them. I wondered what kind of crazy-ass shit he’d done for love.
“Does the degree of crazy imply a greater degree of love?” he mused. “A higher intensity, or larger… amount. Are there different flavors of love like there are flavors of quarks?—heh, yeah. Up love and down love, charm love and strange love, top love and bottom love. I like that.”