WE
A wave.
I think about waves often. Maybe because, reading a book some time ago, I discovered that the world isn’t made of still things. Maybe our sight deceives us, but reality is constantly in motion; it simply moves on a timescale very different from ours.
If I asked anyone who Einstein was, or what his most famous theory is—relativity—I’m fairly sure many people would at least know what I was talking about.
But if the question were, “Do you know what quantum physics is?”, I doubt the answer would be as immediate.
Carlo Rovelli, yes, him, in that book explains it well: it’s not ignorance, nor a rejection of quantum physics. It’s simply harder (I can confirm).
It tangles us up, slips through our grasp, demands a way of imagining the world that looks nothing like what we expect.
The beauty of science, though, lies in learning true things. And true things never fit into a fixed image: they change, they shift, because there is always something new to discover.
One of the first things I learned from this book, for instance, is that in quantum physics there aren’t only particles: there are also waves.
Waves as beautiful as the sea? Almost. With the difference that, even today, no one fully understands how these waves (of electrons) work, and above all their strange way of moving through the world.
These microparticles move, separate, overlap, and when they meet again, they become something completely different.
That’s how electrons behave.
One thing that struck me deeply is how Rovelli often insists on a single point: physics does not describe how things are in an absolute, univocal way, but how things become when they interact with one another. As if in the world there were no definitive state, only relationships.
That would mean, for example, that a diamond is not hard in itself: it becomes hard depending on certain conditions, on the influences it undergoes, on the reciprocal exchanges in which it finds itself existing.
But if you think about it, aren’t we humans made of matter too? Of cells that mix, inside and outside of us, with everything else? Aren’t we, too, made of waves? Of relationships?
And then, perhaps, isn’t love like that as well?
YOU
We slept a lot, a little, well, so-so. We didn’t even open the shutters, but I know the sun is there.
Someone, from a window more or less nearby, is fussing around in the kitchen.
In the air there’s not even a trace of the usual rush-hour noise.
We can breathe each other in with the calm of those who don’t know that time can be wasted or filled; we can watch roses grow old and guess the age of trees just so we can throw them a party.
Love, in that time between us, is a love of cramps and shivers, a love that keeps my spine straight.
It’s in those hours of blurred boundaries and of the lingering possibility that this is still a dream that I often lose myself, wandering among turquoise thoughts.
I wave my arms in the air as if touching the surface of water, I furrow my brow. And you tease me, you mimic me, and I confess that it feels so different from mine.
I ask you: how does time manage to stop and, at the same time, go so fast when we’re together? I ask myself this, digging through the air as if the answer might fall from the ceiling.
But you interrupt that vortex just a moment before it pulls me under.
My hands, I imagine as I look at them, were born to rest between yours and to guard the breath rising in your chest.
I still don’t open my eyes, but I know the sun is there underneath.
This is all the time I desire, held between my lips, while love comes in waves.
ME
But how do cats do it?
I ask myself this as I watch mine with admiration: what is that spell of drowsiness you’re immersed in, stretched out there under this fickle sun?
Only at the end of a tortuous path of thoughts—who knows how or why—must I have arrived at this question. From the hyperuranion, something has slipped into the solid, tangible folds of everyday life.
A tentative of escape: how simple a cat is compared to everything else.
I look at him and he, noticing, questions me with a puzzled stare. And I, who am not usually one to talk to myself, feel brave enough to say: but how do you do it?
Yes, yes. I mean you. How do you make everything so simple?
With narrowed eyes he takes a while to acknowledge me. Then, after a yawn, he comes closer. But not for me. It’s what he wants: the cynical would say it’s what he needs, but I don’t believe that.
He jumps, sharp, sure, straight onto my legs, because only from there, he believes, will he be able to explain himself properly.
He tells me – and I’m fairly sure I invented this part: Being simple is my nature.
Sure, easy for you, cat! But what is my nature?
We humans can’t do things like cats: we are educated, instructed, civilized.
Or maybe those were octopuses? I could be mistaken, I admit it.
And yet, there’s something that makes me think we might resemble each other.
It feels like an absurd thought, but I have to follow it, because in writing—as in life—it’s important to understand where the light comes from.
Maybe it’s the way you silently remain whole even when you move, the way you get up and leave without dragging explanations behind you, that resonates with me. You don’t ask permission, you don’t promise returns, and yet you destroy nothing. On the contrary.
Your gait is light: you know where to be and when to detach, and what exists with you doesn’t need to be constantly touched in order to exist. Even once you’re gone.
Maybe that’s where, without knowing it, we resemble each other. Maybe this is my nature too. Ours.
As if to confirm my theory, he interrupts the purring conversation we were having and leaves, leaving on my legs only the sensation of his presence and a few hairs.
What characters, cats are, I think, smiling.
I chase my thoughts a little inside that wave. A wave, yes.
But the sea is calm.
Ilaria Serpi
Leave a Reply