Things that might or might not exist

There was a time when people would say that love was the most powerful force in the universe. Then, in the mid-17th century, it was discovered that, in fact, space and time are the most powerful forces in the Universe.

This discovery was accredited to Newton (most likely erroneously), in a breakthrough experiment in which he discovered that the time it took to reach his mistress in London would steadily increase in proportion to the distance between them, and that a person’s appearance starts to degenerate as their age approaches infinity. Theories regarding love’s power had also long been based on a sort of theology that was at that time being put into serious question.

Since then mankind has abandoned its centuries long goal of overcoming love, and turned towards the defeat of time and space. Though advances have been recorded over the past few hundred years – space flight, the telephone, image replication – the first true breakthrough was made by a Polish scientist who, using mathematics that have now been completely lost, managed to bend time and space between lovers, virtually eliminating the tyranny of physics.

He secluded himself for many years working on this invention, with the first signs of his success showing up in early 1992, when his girlfriend in France reported regular dreams of them lying in bed together doing nothing for a long time. Unfortunately after thorough study and peer review, a panel of leading scientists came to the conclusion that these were actually only dreams, and not science in the least, and eventually the woman left him for a man who worked at the Sorbonne.

The scientist found other girlfriends though, and tried talking to them, sex with them, taking them out to eat, even singing to him, from his home in Poland. They were all quite entertained but following the general prejudices of the scientific community assumed that these dates outside of time and space were just dreams, and left him because he spent too much time with his work.

With each date though he got closer to perfecting the science of time and space distortion. Until finally he met Isabelle, a nice woman who liked listening to him talk about mathematics, and he was finally able to persuade her that she was not dreaming, but rather living outside of time.

From then on they spent more and more of their time together, often delaying the progress of time for days. And though some might assume that a timeless world would get boring, they found countless things to enjoy themselves with. They would spend what seemed like hours talking about math and sculpture, discussing theology, and telling stories about the people they saw frozen on the streets.

Over the years they spent less and less of their free moments with other people, until one day, quietly, they ceased to exist, having been completely erased from the world of physics. The only memory left of them is a picture they took together a few days after they met. That too is quickly fading.

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She fell in love with the sad looking boy in the picture, not knowing that she had already been in love with him many years before. The picture was in a book about the American civil war she had seen in a bookstore, and while she didn’t know which side he was on, as her knowledge of America was lacking, she instantly recognized him as someone she could easily fall in love with.

He sat on the side of a row of men eating. He was looking up, holding a bit of his sandwich in his right hand and staring back at the camera with not caring eyes. There were a number of things that attracted her to him, first of which was her habit of picking out attractive men from pictures. But also there was something familiar about him. She felt that she knew something personal about him and thus personal about the war.

In fact, she had first fallen in love with him in 672, while flying over Vienna. It was springtime then, and they, being two robins, did what birds do in the springtime. Though romance between birds is a fleeting thing, she took a strong liking to him, the way female birds take a liking to the men who perform for them. The way he perched on things, his beautiful feathers, when him and few other robins chased off a crow. She developed a true fondness for him in a very bird like way. They met during other spring times, had many little robins who’s descendants now populate the earth, and though they were in no way together, since birds never thought of marriage, they still developed a true and lasting fondness.

If this was a story written by a romantic they would have met in every lifetime after that, but in reality whenever they spent the same time living in the world they were hardly ever the same species. Sure when he was a hare he wasn’t sure why that mountain lion didn’t eat him, but I’m guessing that was a coincidence, not her doing. They did share species on a few occasions and on three more they made love, twice birthing children. She never met that poor soldier who died on the battlefield in 1863, the last time they had met was in 1712 as two bears.

Shortly prior to falling in love with the soldier, she had met a young man about her age. He always had a sad air to him, but she liked the way he moved and she liked the things he said, even if he didn’t smile much. They didn’t start dating at once, but she liked him enough that she was embarrassed to tell him about the girlish obsession she got about people long dead. They would wander around the city drinking and laughing, or they’d talk about serious things that they both knew were ridiculous, but he liked talking about them and she liked hearing him talk.

One evening they finally kissed. They almost ran through the city that night, pushing each other against walls and kissing every time they turned a corner. In a few weeks the relationship progressed to what each of them was slightly too afraid to call love. Days and nights spent together, touching each other whenever they could.

On a quiet night, while walking through the city, they stopped somewhere to get food. They had been drinking and laughing all night and didn’t think they had a care in the world. He sat on the curb of a sidewalk eating while she stood in front of him doing the same.

Looking down at him, she noticed something, just for a second. He looked up in the middle of a bite of his sandwich, and gazed back at her. She had the strangest look on her face.

She was about to tell him that she had never been this happy before, but, for a moment, she wasn’t quite so sure.

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I met my wife at a party at a mutual friend’s house in Taibei. We started dating seven years ago yesterday, for a month and a half. Then she had to return to her home country, while I stayed in Taiwan for another six months, and before going to get my Master’s degree in Chicago.

I didn’t let the relationship fade away easily though. We kept in touch over email, and after four months I started writing her letters, through the mail, each ending with a different fairytale. From March 2005 to March 2006 I wrote her 45 different fairytales in weekly letters. Then in June 2006 I moved to Prague, to be with the woman I would eventually marry.

I will be posting the stories every Sunday for the next 45 weeks. I hope you enjoy them.

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