I used to sleep with a runner. She would count her steps jogging, walking, jumping. At ten thousand she would buy new sneakers.

There is always a higher number. Say you are on an escalator, pressed so close to strangers you have to escape, so you imagine you are elsewhere. You are in a memory. Maybe it’s the last time you kissed. You are standing so close to these strangers you could rub noses. But how do you measure the real distance, the distance between your imaginations? You are outside a bar with a friend you had never thought you would hold that way. The man ahead, in the spreadsheet of his mind, is 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 us to escape and hide from unmanageable numbers. I want the rooftops at night, the streets at five in the morning, a wide open space in a museum where the exhibit is space itself. I want to count things that matter, things like the shivers 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.