I counted for five hours
I hear that one hundred thousand people pass through my metro stop every day. I stayed up last night trying to count that high. I counted for five hours and I only reached thirty-six thousand. I fell asleep as the sun was rising. I saw the dawn’s first joggers.
I used to sleep with a runner. She counts her steps, jogging, walking, jumping. She counts to ten thousand, then buys new sneakers.
There is always a higher number. Say you are on an escalator, pressed so close to strangers you have to escape, to imagine you are elsewhere. You are in some memory or another. Maybe it’s the last time you kissed. You are standing so close to these strangers. You could rub noses with the ones going the other way. But how do you measure the real distance? You, outside a bar with a friend you never thought you would hold that way. The man ahead, in his spreadsheet, repeating 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 will land on my palm?
I want to hide with you from unmanageable numbers. I want rooftops at night, the street at five in the morning, a wide open space in a museum where the exhibit is the space itself. I want to count the things that matter, things like the number of tremors in your shiver. I want to think about nothing we cannot count in the space of one 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…
Sadly, if we are talking about a Washington, D.C. rooftop then the number of stars visible is probably between five and twenty. But have you ever been in a big city at night after the power has gone out? That can be so amazing.
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.”
One really interesting integer is Graham’s number. It was once the largest integer used in a serious proof, but I don’t think that’s true anymore. I don’t think the universe is big enough to write it in, except as a recursive formula.
Everytime I read this, me heart begins to race.
Wow.
I miss you.