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There are far too many things standing in the way of us. You must know this.

It sounded like the beginning of a breakup song. Full and angsty and ill conceived. So what if he was an idealist. So what if he thought that she should stay. There was a world out there and it didn’t believe in C average college students facing a mental breakdown. It didn’t believe in her either, it seemed.

She had barely been a glimmer on that grand scale.

It was a long and hard path to disillusionment. It was. He’d played his cello like a good man, pretending that a world suffused with the beautiful sounds existed outside of his mind. He had this gift, this absolute art. He was beyond the mere bindings that people with ambition had. He made things beautiful, he made art.

He stared up at the ceiling. It was overly elaborate for what it should have been. All the dorms did that in this place: gothic architecture and cold sterile air conditioned rooms. It was summer, and it should have felt like it. Where he’d come from, they kept the windows open, preferring the natural breeze to anything processed. But he was North now, what a strange difference that made. It was far hotter where he came from too. And still they welcomed it.

We’re too different, Arian. What will we talk about in another year? All the conversation will have been spent.

He liked how she inflected his name. ar EE an. It was a subtle change, and he’d noticed it, the first time he met her. She had a strange accent, some combination of immigrant and American; one she’d never wanted to discuss. Not quite exotic, unless you got her angry. But he didn’t like to make her angry. That’s what got him into this in the first place.

She hadn’t made fun of his name either, like most his age did. It was too feminine, and he abhorred it. He wanted some strange and seemingly masculine name. He had a few he liked; maybe Jonas or Sebastian or Dathan...

He still thought she had been wrong about that point. But she hadn’t given him enough time to test that theory. Although he was never one for theories: that was her domain.

Lily was a physicist, and she specialized in something he’d never been able to remember, with his almost too short memory. It didn’t matter anyway; a person is hardly defined by what they do. That is merely the side effect, the ripples from the apple dropped in the lake. Her eyes always lit up when he asked her about whatever project she was on; although he’d never really been able to follow. She had told him once that music and mathematics were the same thing, and physics was the natural result of the two. She talked in things like... harmonics. He played the odd flute-like things she made from plumber’s leftover pieces, even though he was more proficient with strings.

Have you no ambition? With your talent, you should be in an international orchestra or a band outside of here. Don’t you ever want to leave this place?

Ambition... ambition... she seemed to believe that would lead to happiness. That desire meant work, which meant... he didn’t really know. Not that he didn’t care, he almost cared too much. She was cold steel and logic. And it burned his too frail skin like acid. She was energy, always talking about leaving, and going and being. Three months into it he realized why she had already had one failed marriage—at nineteen no less—and two months later he realized why at twenty-three she was so terribly appealing. She was the exact tenor of a viola; an instrument that defied euphony and stubbornly sat in on the orchestra, weaving a harmony that made the violins sound like crows.

Nothing so insubstantial and popular could stand up to Lily. She was an idea more than a woman. Or so he made her.

The couch he sat on was hardly comfortable. But he had to sit here, for at least another hour. His therapist had told him so; he had to purge himself of his illusions. Once he believed she would be here, in this very spot. She had a promise to keep; even if she had made it when he still believed she loved him. Every year he had come, even after she had graduated and gone to Massachusetts, even after she had told him he was a child. Even after she had stopped answering his emails.

God, did he ever hate computers. But that was beside the point.

He could hear the seconds on the clock ticking away, rhythmically, taunting him with its precision. He’d always been far too sensitive to sounds; it was what made him a good musician. Was being the operative word. He hadn’t set his fingers on a bow for a couple of years now. He had stopped playing around. He had stopped being a child. He didn’t regret his decision to switch into Business: it was what everyone had wanted him to do anyways. His parents were wealthy enough to let him stay in college for the rest of his life if he wanted.

Maybe he was just delaying, a bit. He should wait another hour after the hour he had previously decided. She would come, she had to come.

Why did you even approach me? It’s not like you crazed music majors come over to the dark side of science too often...

She was always direct. He’d never told her that he thought she was an artist, a painter, when he first saw her. The paint on her was from an experiment; the sinking feeling that one gets from a painter was her stubborn hold on femininity. She had such long hair, always loose, that made certain sounds when she walked. The same color as wood when lacquered, too. She wasn’t strikingly beautiful then; just interesting.

He always chased after interesting things. Because he thought too much, and hadn’t grown up fully.

He decided to open his eyes. The clock hand had moved, and it drooped down morosely, as it always seemed to at the half hour. He didn’t bother to look at the other hand; it was of no importance. He hated numbers anyway, they lacked a soul. Not that he had one either; he just pretended. And as another pretty girl passed by, looking nothing like Lily, the hour held even less sway. Pretty was a visual aberration; like pink and daisies. The things that women should concern themselves with.

He suddenly felt very old. He’d forgotten to count his birthdays anymore, but he had the feeling that he had gotten quite old. He’d lost some hair, and gained some weight. Those were some indication, he knew, but of what exactly... he was unsure.

He suddenly realized the true foolishness of coming here every year, like she would walk down the grand staircase (though the building had none, he’d always imagined it did) and wave, letting him know that he still existed.

It was then that he heard it, the rustle, the bruissement... of hair that had grown since it had been savagely cut off. He hadn’t realized he had shut his eyes again, but he waited until opening them. He didn’t want illusions anymore, that was what it meant to be disillusioned, wasn’t it?

“I guess it’s a little late to keep promises.”

He opened his eyes wide with the voice, dismissing any further ideas from his head. He’d rehearsed the lines to say, he had so many questions, but he wasn’t prepared, and he realized all along he hadn’t believed hadn’t actually thought that she would...

“No.” His reply escaped his lips before he could tame them. He lost his hold on sound so long ago, when he took an axe to his cello, when he decided to become practical.

“Arian...” she whispered, like a curse one gives to old ladies behind their backs, “...Have you been waiting all this time? It’s been five years.”

She was always so direct. And she spoke numbers like they were sacred runes. She would know his age, but he didn’t want to know that number really. He knew he was old because of the coldness of his bed sheets, the continued loss of vibrancy in the winter.

“Of course you would know the number.” He didn’t mean it to sound so harsh, but it felt like that. The way she pursed her lips suggested it. Since when did she wear lipstick... it looked so foreign on her face.

“Listen... I’m here more for myself than you,” she stated, like she was delivering a thesis to a room full of bored students, “My therapist told me to go to a place that made me think of... everything. It’s called catharsis.”

She always like to explain things, he’d always thought she would be a good teacher someday. She didn’t like the idea; of course, she was on the straight and narrow as far as physicists were concerned. He thought she might have discovered something, and something important too, but the words had failed her when she told him.

“That’s funny. Our therapists must have gone to the same school.”

She winced at his statement, a subtle thing he still noticed. In fact, everything about her was subtle, but she pretended to be direct. Just like he pretended to be elusive and adult.

“I heard you’re doing business school now.”

So she started the idle talk. He didn’t know why she did, or why he replied honestly. The more questions he answered, the more pathetic he became, and the less ideal she seemed. She made weapons now, with government contracts in every corner. She wasn’t in school anymore; she had graduated slightly early with her doctorate. He still didn’t have an undergraduate, with all the switching around he had done. Five years, indeed. Since parting? Was that how she measured time... they were so alike, after all.

“...And I didn’t mean it,” she ended with a puff of breath, like she had run a marathon instead of spoke. She looked directly at him—since when were her eyes gray?—sending an involuntary shiver down his spine.

You’re useless Arian! You can’t keep playing your life away. At least I’m going somewhere... I can’t keep waiting on you!

He thought that she would provide all the answers. So mature even for a woman of twenty three, the only number he’d ever been able to remember, so strong and willful. Why had he made her the solution? She was just the problem. Now mathematics made sense.

“Yes you did. Every word of it. And I changed, Lily. At least I thought I did.”

She glanced sharply away, eyes affixing to the hour hand. She would focus on such things, everything was the future for her, everything. She couldn’t pick out her breakfast without weighing the consequence.

“You have,” she murmured, a slow and deliberate thing, “Oh God, you have...”

Lily never cried, and she prided herself of that fact. She worked with men all the time and they liked to see women cry in their boys’ club. She never gave them that satisfaction; even her ex-husband, a former teacher of hers. She’d tried the whole spectrum: physicist to artist. And she had learned nothing. He could she it in her posture—when had she sat down?—and in the way she fiddled with her hair.

“You’re married.”

He stated it plainly, like universal fact. He knew how she hated to be alone, despite her bravado, and it seemed a likely excuse for her to be there. She turned to him, with a humorless smile; eyes glistening like he’d always hoped they would.

“Not yet. Not for another month or so,” she replied warmly, like letting out the air of a balloon. So she was doing this for a reason beyond nostalgia. She always had reasons; she couldn’t breathe otherwise.

“I didn’t mean to change you,” she said, losing the saccharine attempt at composure, “I’m sorry you don’t play anymore.”

“It wasn’t you.”

And he believed it, for the first moment, that this woman, this idea, he had built up was no more the reason than the slow arthritis that had consumed his wrist. The reason was no reason at all; there were no such illusions. He had stopped himself, thinking in that overly dramatized way that everything depended on a woman; when in fact it depended on...

“You were always my reason.”

He didn’t even hear her words; they just floated in his mind. Was this what it was like to be falling? Maybe he hadn’t loved her at all, and from the water that seeped slowly from her gray left eye, he must not have noticed.

I promise... that I’ll meet you here, if we ever become too separated to care. If I lose you somewhere along the way. In this very lobby, where you played for me the first time. Nostalgic, huh?

Nostalgic. No, it hurt too much to be that. God, he didn’t ever love her...

“Arian... how did we fall away?”

...until now. And that hurt the worst of all. She was going to leave soon enough, he could see her muscles tensing to spring away, and he didn’t want her to. Not so that he could exist... so that she could. Because the world disappeared when you weren’t looking.

“We sank.”

And she smiled at that. She knew the joke in it better than he did. She held onto memory so much more, so much more completely than he did. Because she always had a reason.

“Will you... run away with me?”

He said it before he could formulate it properly. All he could think of was the sounds of her sitting next to him, the sounds of her breathing, her heartbeat through her blouse...
His memories were such imperfect things compared to the washed out woman before him. He’d always thought her eyes were blue. He’d always thought she’d been clever and detached and cold, but that he would change into this loving, warm and bright woman. He was wrong. So very very wrong. He’d wanted her to become... him. Just like she’d wanted him to become her.

She shook her head; a negative response.

She was in the uniform of the scientific elite now; she’d lost the paint splattered jeans and easy T-shirt. And he was wearing what remained of a suit after he’d shed the layers that trapped too much heat. They were both so adult and so utterly foolish.

Her red lips formed the beginning of a sound.

He waited for her reasons; she had so many to count. She was like a money lender, always counting and doling things out in increments and iterations. God, no wonder scientists hadn’t found the origin of the universe; they didn’t even know themselves. And she didn’t know what she wanted, even though she’d told a man that she would marry him, like her professor, the man with the goatee who’d told her about particle physics and made her go to so many conferences. It was no wonder she’d been married once already.

It was no wonder that he’d made her the solution. Because when they were together, they were the same person; apart, only a half.

“Yes.”

He wanted to buy a new cello. He would do that as soon as he pulled himself away from her, out of her trembling arms. He would give his gnarled fingers one more go, after they’d decided where to run off to. It wasn’t like he needed college anyway.

“I’ve got a sinking feeling this won’t be easy.”

“I hope so. How else could it be real?”

And he smiled into her hair, knowing that it was right.

Description
There are far too many things standing in the way of us. You must know this.

It sounded like the beginning of a breakup song. Full and angsty and ill conceived. So what if he was an idealist. So what if he thought that she should stay. There was a world out there and it didn’t believe in C average college students facing a mental breakdown. It didn’t believe in her either, it seemed.

She had barely been a glimmer on that grand scale.

It was a long and hard path to disillusionment. It was. He’d played his cello like a good man, pretending that a world suffused with the beautiful sounds existed outside of his mind. He had this gift, this absolute art. He was beyond the mere bindings that people with ambition had. He made things beautiful, he made art.

He stared up at the ceiling. It was overly elaborate for what it should have been. All the dorms did that in this place: gothic architecture and cold sterile air conditioned rooms. It was summer, and it should have felt like it. Where he’d come from, they kept the windows open, preferring the natural breeze to anything processed. But he was North now, what a strange difference that made. It was far hotter where he came from too. And still they welcomed it.

We’re too different, Arian. What will we talk about in another year? All the conversation will have been spent.

He liked how she inflected his name. ar EE an. It was a subtle change, and he’d noticed it, the first time he met her. She had a strange accent, some combination of immigrant and American; one she’d never wanted to discuss. Not quite exotic, unless you got her angry. But he didn’t like to make her angry. That’s what got him into this in the first place.

She hadn’t made fun of his name either, like most his age did. It was too feminine, and he abhorred it. He wanted some strange and seemingly masculine name. He had a few he liked; maybe Jonas or Sebastian or Dathan...

He still thought she had been wrong about that point. But she hadn’t given him enough time to test that theory. Although he was never one for theories: that was her domain.

Lily was a physicist, and she specialized in something he’d never been able to remember, with his almost too short memory. It didn’t matter anyway; a person is hardly defined by what they do. That is merely the side effect, the ripples from the apple dropped in the lake. Her eyes always lit up when he asked her about whatever project she was on; although he’d never really been able to follow. She had told him once that music and mathematics were the same thing, and physics was the natural result of the two. She talked in things like... harmonics. He played the odd flute-like things she made from plumber’s leftover pieces, even though he was more proficient with strings.

Have you no ambition? With your talent, you should be in an international orchestra or a band outside of here. Don’t you ever want to leave this place?

Ambition... ambition... she seemed to believe that would lead to happiness. That desire meant work, which meant... he didn’t really know. Not that he didn’t care, he almost cared too much. She was cold steel and logic. And it burned his too frail skin like acid. She was energy, always talking about leaving, and going and being. Three months into it he realized why she had already had one failed marriage—at nineteen no less—and two months later he realized why at twenty-three she was so terribly appealing. She was the exact tenor of a viola; an instrument that defied euphony and stubbornly sat in on the orchestra, weaving a harmony that made the violins sound like crows.

Nothing so insubstantial and popular could stand up to Lily. She was an idea more than a woman. Or so he made her.

The couch he sat on was hardly comfortable. But he had to sit here, for at least another hour. His therapist had told him so; he had to purge himself of his illusions. Once he believed she would be here, in this very spot. She had a promise to keep; even if she had made it when he still believed she loved him. Every year he had come, even after she had graduated and gone to Massachusetts, even after she had told him he was a child. Even after she had stopped answering his emails.

God, did he ever hate computers. But that was beside the point.

He could hear the seconds on the clock ticking away, rhythmically, taunting him with its precision. He’d always been far too sensitive to sounds; it was what made him a good musician. Was being the operative word. He hadn’t set his fingers on a bow for a couple of years now. He had stopped playing around. He had stopped being a child. He didn’t regret his decision to switch into Business: it was what everyone had wanted him to do anyways. His parents were wealthy enough to let him stay in college for the rest of his life if he wanted.

Maybe he was just delaying, a bit. He should wait another hour after the hour he had previously decided. She would come, she had to come.

Why did you even approach me? It’s not like you crazed music majors come over to the dark side of science too often...

She was always direct. He’d never told her that he thought she was an artist, a painter, when he first saw her. The paint on her was from an experiment; the sinking feeling that one gets from a painter was her stubborn hold on femininity. She had such long hair, always loose, that made certain sounds when she walked. The same color as wood when lacquered, too. She wasn’t strikingly beautiful then; just interesting.

He always chased after interesting things. Because he thought too much, and hadn’t grown up fully.

He decided to open his eyes. The clock hand had moved, and it drooped down morosely, as it always seemed to at the half hour. He didn’t bother to look at the other hand; it was of no importance. He hated numbers anyway, they lacked a soul. Not that he had one either; he just pretended. And as another pretty girl passed by, looking nothing like Lily, the hour held even less sway. Pretty was a visual aberration; like pink and daisies. The things that women should concern themselves with.

He suddenly felt very old. He’d forgotten to count his birthdays anymore, but he had the feeling that he had gotten quite old. He’d lost some hair, and gained some weight. Those were some indication, he knew, but of what exactly... he was unsure.

He suddenly realized the true foolishness of coming here every year, like she would walk down the grand staircase (though the building had none, he’d always imagined it did) and wave, letting him know that he still existed.

It was then that he heard it, the rustle, the bruissement... of hair that had grown since it had been savagely cut off. He hadn’t realized he had shut his eyes again, but he waited until opening them. He didn’t want illusions anymore, that was what it meant to be disillusioned, wasn’t it?

“I guess it’s a little late to keep promises.”

He opened his eyes wide with the voice, dismissing any further ideas from his head. He’d rehearsed the lines to say, he had so many questions, but he wasn’t prepared, and he realized all along he hadn’t believed hadn’t actually thought that she would...

“No.” His reply escaped his lips before he could tame them. He lost his hold on sound so long ago, when he took an axe to his cello, when he decided to become practical.

“Arian...” she whispered, like a curse one gives to old ladies behind their backs, “...Have you been waiting all this time? It’s been five years.”

She was always so direct. And she spoke numbers like they were sacred runes. She would know his age, but he didn’t want to know that number really. He knew he was old because of the coldness of his bed sheets, the continued loss of vibrancy in the winter.

“Of course you would know the number.” He didn’t mean it to sound so harsh, but it felt like that. The way she pursed her lips suggested it. Since when did she wear lipstick... it looked so foreign on her face.

“Listen... I’m here more for myself than you,” she stated, like she was delivering a thesis to a room full of bored students, “My therapist told me to go to a place that made me think of... everything. It’s called catharsis.”

She always like to explain things, he’d always thought she would be a good teacher someday. She didn’t like the idea; of course, she was on the straight and narrow as far as physicists were concerned. He thought she might have discovered something, and something important too, but the words had failed her when she told him.

“That’s funny. Our therapists must have gone to the same school.”

She winced at his statement, a subtle thing he still noticed. In fact, everything about her was subtle, but she pretended to be direct. Just like he pretended to be elusive and adult.

“I heard you’re doing business school now.”

So she started the idle talk. He didn’t know why she did, or why he replied honestly. The more questions he answered, the more pathetic he became, and the less ideal she seemed. She made weapons now, with government contracts in every corner. She wasn’t in school anymore; she had graduated slightly early with her doctorate. He still didn’t have an undergraduate, with all the switching around he had done. Five years, indeed. Since parting? Was that how she measured time... they were so alike, after all.

“...And I didn’t mean it,” she ended with a puff of breath, like she had run a marathon instead of spoke. She looked directly at him—since when were her eyes gray?—sending an involuntary shiver down his spine.

You’re useless Arian! You can’t keep playing your life away. At least I’m going somewhere... I can’t keep waiting on you!

He thought that she would provide all the answers. So mature even for a woman of twenty three, the only number he’d ever been able to remember, so strong and willful. Why had he made her the solution? She was just the problem. Now mathematics made sense.

“Yes you did. Every word of it. And I changed, Lily. At least I thought I did.”

She glanced sharply away, eyes affixing to the hour hand. She would focus on such things, everything was the future for her, everything. She couldn’t pick out her breakfast without weighing the consequence.

“You have,” she murmured, a slow and deliberate thing, “Oh God, you have...”

Lily never cried, and she prided herself of that fact. She worked with men all the time and they liked to see women cry in their boys’ club. She never gave them that satisfaction; even her ex-husband, a former teacher of hers. She’d tried the whole spectrum: physicist to artist. And she had learned nothing. He could she it in her posture—when had she sat down?—and in the way she fiddled with her hair.

“You’re married.”

He stated it plainly, like universal fact. He knew how she hated to be alone, despite her bravado, and it seemed a likely excuse for her to be there. She turned to him, with a humorless smile; eyes glistening like he’d always hoped they would.

“Not yet. Not for another month or so,” she replied warmly, like letting out the air of a balloon. So she was doing this for a reason beyond nostalgia. She always had reasons; she couldn’t breathe otherwise.

“I didn’t mean to change you,” she said, losing the saccharine attempt at composure, “I’m sorry you don’t play anymore.”

“It wasn’t you.”

And he believed it, for the first moment, that this woman, this idea, he had built up was no more the reason than the slow arthritis that had consumed his wrist. The reason was no reason at all; there were no such illusions. He had stopped himself, thinking in that overly dramatized way that everything depended on a woman; when in fact it depended on...

“You were always my reason.”

He didn’t even hear her words; they just floated in his mind. Was this what it was like to be falling? Maybe he hadn’t loved her at all, and from the water that seeped slowly from her gray left eye, he must not have noticed.

I promise... that I’ll meet you here, if we ever become too separated to care. If I lose you somewhere along the way. In this very lobby, where you played for me the first time. Nostalgic, huh?

Nostalgic. No, it hurt too much to be that. God, he didn’t ever love her...

“Arian... how did we fall away?”

...until now. And that hurt the worst of all. She was going to leave soon enough, he could see her muscles tensing to spring away, and he didn’t want her to. Not so that he could exist... so that she could. Because the world disappeared when you weren’t looking.

“We sank.”

And she smiled at that. She knew the joke in it better than he did. She held onto memory so much more, so much more completely than he did. Because she always had a reason.

“Will you... run away with me?”

He said it before he could formulate it properly. All he could think of was the sounds of her sitting next to him, the sounds of her breathing, her heartbeat through her blouse...
His memories were such imperfect things compared to the washed out woman before him. He’d always thought her eyes were blue. He’d always thought she’d been clever and detached and cold, but that he would change into this loving, warm and bright woman. He was wrong. So very very wrong. He’d wanted her to become... him. Just like she’d wanted him to become her.

She shook her head; a negative response.

She was in the uniform of the scientific elite now; she’d lost the paint splattered jeans and easy T-shirt. And he was wearing what remained of a suit after he’d shed the layers that trapped too much heat. They were both so adult and so utterly foolish.

Her red lips formed the beginning of a sound.

He waited for her reasons; she had so many to count. She was like a money lender, always counting and doling things out in increments and iterations. God, no wonder scientists hadn’t found the origin of the universe; they didn’t even know themselves. And she didn’t know what she wanted, even though she’d told a man that she would marry him, like her professor, the man with the goatee who’d told her about particle physics and made her go to so many conferences. It was no wonder she’d been married once already.

It was no wonder that he’d made her the solution. Because when they were together, they were the same person; apart, only a half.

“Yes.”

He wanted to buy a new cello. He would do that as soon as he pulled himself away from her, out of her trembling arms. He would give his gnarled fingers one more go, after they’d decided where to run off to. It wasn’t like he needed college anyway.

“I’ve got a sinking feeling this won’t be easy.”

“I hope so. How else could it be real?”

And he smiled into her hair, knowing that it was right.