Electricity travels at 300,000 kilometers per second. For the uninitiated, that may as well be the speed of light. It’s an electromagnetic wave, sure, but with a wavelength of 5,000 kilometers, it’s basically a tsunami.
So, by the time you sent your text from California, it was already in Chicago. The vibration in my pocket sent a similar wavelength to my brain, a nerve pulse of my own design. All within a millisecond, my stomach dropped, the tiny currents of my body knowing what was coming well before I did.
I’m not coming back, the text read. I’m sorry.
I tried to imagine the currents your own body must have been emitting, the tears your brain must have told your eyes to shed. But imagining was its own form of torture. I thought of us instead, the way your fingers used to touch my own, the way they tingled. I imagined we were still connected somehow, our nerves stretched across the telephone wires, linking your body to mine.
If only it were true. Despite the millions of synapses firing in my head, my tiny waves of spirit had no way to reach you. The space between us was too vast, the air too full of tiny ripples. Wi-Fi, photons, radio – we’d stuffed the atmosphere with knowledge we could never grasp. No wonder the loons thought we’d turned the frogs gay. We’d trapped lightning in a bottle, mastering the universe with a light switch.
I sat down at my desk, uncaring for the office chatter happening all around me. Outside, the city danced with hundreds of currents indifferent to my own. The river still flowed west from the lake; the trains still ran in both directions. Lights turned on and off as the sun set, and the rain fell from the sky. Everything followed the pull of some great law, and yet, I had no guide for my own actions.
I summoned all the vectors of my mind, the great thought clouds that attempt to guide us. Even with my eyes shut, I could see you, our memories played over again as a shoddy simulacrum. I could see the currents in our own lives, the ones that had pulled us together and taken us apart again. It was like a tide. And still, in it, I think I saw a through line, a coda that made the rest of me snap back into focus.
The entire thing was like some tiny miracle. Like a single-celled organism swallowing mitochondria, we were something the universe had allowed. Here we were, creatures pulled from the literal sea to walk on land. Impossibly, the same electricity from a storm on Mars had become the means of life on Earth. All the currents had conspired. Like the Big Bang, we were just another wavelength, a galaxy experiencing itself. We had language to speak with, childhoods to remember, secrets to divulge. And inside it all, hidden from the world, was love.
I’m happy for you, I wrote back. Don’t be a stranger.
Like a message in a bottle, I tossed it into the current. The electric pulse from my brain to my finger hit send. The Wi-Fi captured it, sending it to a telephone tower. The tower turned it into light, shooting it along a network fiber optic cable. It pinged off of a million tiny mirrors until it found you. At least I hope it found you. And if it did, I hope the current somehow brings you back.
INSTANT NOODLES 