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.

The equation on the heart gives the period of a pendulum based on the length of its chain, acceleration due to gravity, and pi, the ratio of a circle to its diameter. All are constant.

Do you experience love as always coming back to a center? Do you sway and return, or might you fly away forever any time you swing?

So much in nature resembles or describes itself at different scales, from different angles. What have you noticed that is self-similar or symmetrical in that way?

If only we could just replenish and turn, replenish and turn, never run out of blank slates. Maybe we can. That’s what I hope for, anyway.

Have you ever noticed how so much of everything people know, they know from circles and straight lines? Even 1 and 0. Arguably, the constants pi and e and even the root of -1 come from circles and lines.

You know that feeling, when you really “get” a work of art, or the stars in the sky or the clouds just overwhelm you, or a massive number floors you? I think there’s something honest about feeling tiny.

If you want to confuse yourself, then the next time you look at a mobile, imagine what four-dimensional object, if spun through three dimensions, would look like that mobile.