Of Indeterminable Value

Aug 19, 2008 - 08:12 AM PST

Her hair was not curly like a string of S’s, nor curly like an office phone’s cord. Most often, it was curly like the waves of a 3rd grader’s seascape -- clinging to her head like English Ivy tendrils when wet, and tangling (or untangling) like steel wool when agitated. Her skin was less polarizing, having the color and texture of what one would suppose handmade buttermilk to be like. Her eyes were tall and wide -- in no way too large for her head, but larger than might have been risked if someone had designed her themselves. Her body looked thin and delicate, but only because the exact source of its strength took pleasure in surprising people.

There was no way he could have suspected, but this was everything he would ever need to know about her.

While there’s no disputing that he thought she was beautiful, he had been trying to get away from that mode of thinking for quite some time (one of those sad cases who had started to believe that beauty is only skin deep). In fact, he looked at her that first time thinking she was pretty unremarkable besides her incredible beauty.

He was far less beautiful than she, but it wouldn’t have suited him anyway. This was actually part of his appeal.

He fluttered back and forth between assuredness and self-deprecation during their first conversation -- a technique born long before from the necessity to appear confident and sensitive without being cocky or insecure. He was none of these, but he’d found that people were easily spellbound by stories about life and love and hope. He had all of these, and because of this, he was also used to having his way.

Then, something incredible happened.

She told him of a question. She did not ask the question, nor did she speak the answer. All she did was pose it. What the question was is not important. What’s important is that he had never heard a question like it before. And it was the first time in years he was not forced to think the same thoughts over and over again. But strangely, his new thinking was not on the answer to the question, or even on the question itself. All he could think about was how much he loved her.

She decided that she loved him too. She had never met anyone like him -- if only because as a late bloomer, she hadn’t been properly introduced to all the varieties of men the world had to offer.

Concrescence followed quickly. But then, so did circumstance -- the kind of circumstance that fools revere as omnipotent intervention. Their split met little resistance due to the belief that every action in life has an equal and opposite reaction. But fate, not being bound by the laws of physics, karma, or any other ethos, has a way of confounding such plans.

It’s uncertain whether it was the youthful assumption that one’s own will is the will of the world, or good old-fashioned defiance, but he never let go of the possibility. She, on the other hand -- having been properly introduced to all the varieties of men the world had to offer -- went on to create many more possibilities.

Years later, having graduated from questions to answers, she would sincerely miss the time-stopping satisfaction that hard-thought revelations used to bring. Some times she would think of him. Other times she would think of other hims. “But,” she said to the half-constructed dish she was preparing at a time later than originally planned “neither’s as troublesome as thinking of future hims.”

He would come to forget what her original question had been, but often marvel at the impact it had on his life. The women that came and went could attest to his preoccupation, but their queries into its nature never produced any reliable findings. Some times he left them. Other times they left him. All he came to learn was that new thoughts permutate into old at some unobservable, incalculable moment.

Then, something incredible happened.

Intelligence unmasked itself to him in a dream. What the dream was is not important. What’s important is that for the very first time, he looked upon intelligence in much the same way he did beauty; an overrated trait revealing nothing of the soul. “But,” he spoke into the drizzling water of a shower that unwrapped his morning eyes, “at least beauty doesn’t have the power to conceal itself.”