Image by Wave Generics from Pixabay
My life is a complicated long division sum.
811,946,422,277 divided by 137.
Just do the math.
0 ÷ 0 = infinity/undefined
I am a cosmos unfolding along the ocean current of time. I am space. I am absorbed in the eternal present. It is an endless, beautiful fascination of ideas that form and dissolve and reform. Forever new, forever enticing. Wondrous.
Knock, knock.
What?
Life is passing.
Is it?
Do something.
Sorry?
No, you really do have to do something.
Thanks for the suggestion but I think I’ll just stay here.
No, you can’t, just go do some math.
You mean like, 0 ÷ 0 = infinity?
No, use real numbers. You need to move.
But I have no inertia.
I know. That’s beside the point. Generate gravity and pull yourself together.
How?
You have a body and it is heavy. Very, very heavy.
Oh yes… you’re right, so I do.
Knock knock.
Hmmm.
You were going to do something.
Was I?
I don’t think you noticed, time has passed.
Has it?
Yes, at least an hour has gone by.
Oh shit, I think you’re right.
1 ÷ 1 = (write your answer here)
I am creating. I am writing. Words make connections, they flow. They dress themselves and walk the catwalk in their designer made, coolest outfits. Colour, shape, texture, flow. Catch me, use me. I sew them together and rip them apart. I chop the hemline, pinch the waist and reshape the neck until the outfit is some smooth, elegant, sparse prose. I step back from the details—the lapels and the silver buttons—and I see the whole fashion show. I’m engaged, involved, immersed. I am me. The dress hugs my form, reveals my mind and I feel… satisfied that it’s over. I’ve lost interest and moved on. Publish? Why would I bother to do that?
10 ÷ 2 = (write your answer here)
I empty the dishwasher. I shop for food in the market. I cook. I shower. Occasionally I clean. I look after my body. Nothing fancy, just eat, sleep, walk, sit, wash.
144 ÷ 8 = (write your answer here) That one made you pause. Just for a second or two. I know it did.
I must decorate the spare bedroom. It is not a project I relish. I have zero motivation and by the simple expedient of shutting the bedroom door, the whole task ceases to exist in any of the parallel universes of my conscious mind.
One day, I randomly open the door. I recall, as if from a distant, long forgotten past (which is in fact about three weeks ago) that:
- the room exists and
- I was going to paint it.
I walk into it and look around. It is full of junk that I have put there whilst decorating all the other rooms in the house. I walk out again and leave the door open. The room now exists in my reality.
I think about it in micro steps. Today I will do something. Not nothing, just something. I move the table to the dressing room and pick up some random papers and irrelevant stuff and deposit them on top of it. On returning it occurs to me that I need a rubbish bag.
I walk into the kitchen and open the cupboard under the sink where the bin bags live and see the recycling. It is Wednesday, I must put it out ready for collection tomorrow. I’ll do that now before I forget. On the way back I notice that the plants need watering. I turn on the hose and leave it balanced in a way that waters the things most in need. I go back into the house and pick up some music that has fallen on the floor. It is a piece I am currently learning and I sit down to play it. I desire tea. Caffeine, that self-medication that I used before I even knew what it did. I boil the kettle and think about what to make for dinner. An hour later, I become aware of an unidentified hissing. It is the sound of water.
Two days later, I notice the bedroom door is open. I remember I was going to paint that room. I’ll just do something. Not nothing, just something…
391 ÷ 17 = (write your answer here) You thought you might stop playing at this point didn’t you? Or perhaps you’re some math whizz who knows their 17x table off by heart, even when it strays past 12×17. Or perhaps the more diligent, conscientious ones amongst you, carefully worked it out using their fingers and toes. It’s really not that hard, quite doable if you put in a bit of effort.
I have an event in my diary. It is at 2.30 in the afternoon. It involves someone else so I have to remember. The problem with remembering is that it requires a sense of a future that is going to happen. But there is no future, and to be honest, there’s not a lot of past either. The future and the past are just imagination. Not real. I mean, isn’t the present all we’ve actually got? And what is the present except 0 ÷ 0.
From breakfast through to lunch, I nudge myself out of the present to imagine a future in which I meet a person. Occasionally the future jerks me with an electrifying adrenaline shot and I panic myself into checking the time, the date and the state of my undress. It’s OK, I’m safe, the future is not supposed to have happened yet. I am not able to do anything else, as I know that like painting the spare bedroom, I will forget that I have to do this imaginary event in the future and get sidetracked.
I set an alarm. I meticulously plan how to get out of the house and into the city. It has time stamps. I put my water bottle next to the door. But I forget to find my car keys in advance. I have two minutes to find them. I retrace my steps all over the house, I unmake the bed, I look behind the cushions, I check the bathroom drawer. I find them in the fridge. I get into the car. I start the car. There is no water bottle beside me. I make my first of three trips back to the house. Second trip, sunglasses. Third trip, teeth.
Eventually, at precisely 2.30pm, the imaginary future becomes the real present.
52,758 ÷ 27 = (write your answer here) You gave up, didn’t you? I know you did, stop pretending.
I am invited to a party. It is my friend’s party. I want to go, because they are my friend and I want to show that I appreciate the invitation. I walk in the door and am robbed of my ability to read the room, because there are simply too many people milling around in a small space. I have no job title to act out, no character to become. I have to be me. But that’s 0 ÷ 0. Immediately I am unanchored, drifting across an open sea with no compass.
I smile and latch onto someone whom I have met before, at this party last year. They are a kind, normal, receptive human being. They smile in return and ask some question to which the answer should be something bland and innocuous. I try to drag myself into the place that can oblige them with what they expect. But 0 is already being divided by something very rapidly tending to 0.
I desperately generate gravity. I find that my answer contains the word death, but too late I’ve embarked upon it. They look surprised, but now there is a gravity well forming, and all the expanse of my universe is pouring into it. The sparkling cosmos of extraordinary ideas is a wondrous adventure to be explored in a frenzy of intensity and hyper-concentration. I find that five minutes later they are staring at me, unease flickering behind a fixed smile.. I know from past experience that I have pinned them, like a butterfly to a board. An internal voice screams, back off, back off right now!
I step to the side and allow them to escape across the room to a conversation about golf.
I see a piano. I sit down and I play. I play for the pleasure of others and the relief of myself. I am there, I am participating, I am acceptable.
154,366 divided by 79 = (write your answer here) You’ve moved on haven’t you? Simply not worth the effort.
I go to work. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and I hyper-concentrate on what I’m being asked to do for 3.5 hour stretches. Then, exhausted, I go home and escape into 0 ÷ 0, after which I sleep. It keeps my body alive.
I wear a mask, under which I am doing complicated long division sums in real time, second by second.
Of course nobody ever guesses that I born freak.
Salatheel 