I heard that 100,000 people pass through my stop on the metro every day. Numbers like this keep me up at night; I have a problem with the sheer scale of things, I am easily bewildered. Just last night, I stayed up counting. I wanted to put myself in perspective, measure that number out in syllables, and in failing, achieve a sense of tininess, of urgency. I counted for five hours and reached 36,000. I fell asleep as the sun was rising. I saw the street lights go out. How many lightbulbs must there be in the world, it is unthinkable. I saw the dawn’s first joggers.
My last girlfriend only wore sneakers. She would count her steps running, walking, jumping. At 10,000 steps she would buy herself a new pair, or switch to the extra pair she had bought the time before. She must know exactly how many steps she has taken over the past six years, when she started this.
It is the escalator into the metro system that presses me closest to people—to anyone but a girlfriend. The only direction of escape, of space, is into memory or imagination. So how do you measure the true distance between you and another? What is the distance between two points in two imaginations? You, outside a bar with a friend you had never thought you would hold that way. The man ahead, in the spreadsheet of his mind, gazing in defeat at a calculation that proves he must sell his home.
How many times will your heart beat? If I slide my fingers into your hair, how many strands of it will cross my palm? How many times will you hear a cat’s purr? How many times will I realize for the first time, that I am in love again?
Is there an escape from unknowable, unmanageable numbers? I want the rooftops at night, when the sky is less full of planes. I want the streets before they are covered in cars, the wide open space of a museum where the exhibit on display is space itself. I want to count things that matter, make a list of them, start by counting the number of times you shiver before a kiss. I want to live inside what we can count to in a night.
How about hiding out on a rooftop from the unmanageable number of anything, but of stars, which are conveniently scattered into the wide open space we call the “sky,” counting with your friend contemplating about your last kiss with the person you never thought you’d hold that way? This seems to be the perfect solution to your equation with multiple unknowns… And who cares that you can’t count all the stars in the space of one night? They’ll be there tomorrow, won’t they??? The finishing doesn’t matter much, but the process that is priceless…
i remember a black-out a few years ago. all the stars and headlights were gorgeous. and i even saw what my neighbor said was Mars (and i hope i actually did see it for real, but i doubt i’ll ever know for sure). i’m actually anticipating another, odd as that may sound.
this sounds beautiful, by the way. i would absolutely adore to be able to do this at some point in my life.
I want to sabatoge the power of a city for one hour, let the truth speak for itself, blind the people with numbers.
This makes solving improper integrals a little difficult. I’ll have to save that thought for when I’m not taking calculus. It’s kinda fun thinking about measuring something as it approaches infinity.
We use the term ‘almost all’ pretty loosely, but it has a specific meaning in math. Almost all means all except a certain set. So you can say “almost all numbers aren’t one”, but what reminds me of this is that you can say “almost all numbers are very, very large” because for whatever humongous number you want to think of, there are an infinite number of larger numbers. A googol is 10^100, pretty freaking huge, but take a googol of googols, and do that a googol times, raise that to a googol, there’s still an infinite number of numbers larger. Maybe I’m weird but I think conceptualizing insanely huge numbers is neat. Well, for a few minutes anyway.
And then there are the irrational numbers, described to me by a writer I admire as “the spaces between the numbers.”
Everytime I read this, me heart begins to race.
Wow.
I miss you.