District taqueria. Do you remember that conversation? We were sitting on that awful brown loveseat you’d rescued from a dumpster. You were heating dinner in the microwave, and the room smelled like curry. The fog rolled through the city and we both wore old sweaters. I didn’t yet know the relevance of Reno.
“If we’re separated,” you said.
“Why Reno?”
“It’s inland. When the big quake hits the Bay, Reno’s safe. Or if there’s a missile strike or something. No one strikes Reno.”
“You’re paranoid,” I said.
You shrugged. “I’m aware.”
We’d been living together for six months. We made good roommates—both of us loud, and neither of us tidy. You took out the trash, and I sorted the mail; we both did dishes when needed, and not more often. I didn’t mind your waterskis propped against the fridge, or your physics books scattered on the pizza-stained carpet. You didn’t mind the way I always slammed doors and drawers, no matter how quiet I tried to be. It was a good arrangement. But not what I wanted.
I knew you loved me, of course. It was written in your eyes when you looked at me, a physics problem with no clear answer. If an irresistible force meets an immovable object, what happens then?
They meet. That’s all we know. Relative to each other, they are in contact. From within the object or the force, there is no way to tell if you’re in motion.
For a while, I was Charon to your Pluto, keeping the same faces to each other as we circled around endlessly.
And through all of this you still thought of me as a moon, and yourself as a planet. But it’s not so easy as that. Our orbit is erratic, an ellipse among circles, an offbeat pattern in a regular solar system. Do you see the sun, far in the distance? Even when our orbit sweeps close to the sun, it takes four hours for its light to reach us. It’s a centerpoint that keeps us captured. We circle it so we don’t fly off into space. It’s a point of reference, and it proves to us that we’re always in motion.
We keep moving, along with everything else. Even if we can’t see where or how.
By the time we got together, it was more for convenience than anything else.
It was what we did: have sex, fight, break up, meet someone else. And when the new relationship burned out, like a magnesium ribbon flared and gone, we’d find each other again.
The best thing between us was the sex. We fought—oh, yes, we fought—and then had make-up sex. Hard, hot, and heavy. You’d drive into me just before I was ready—
When you slept, I’d stroke your rough, calloused fingers and the Superglued cuts in your feet from waterskiing. I’d think about our next fight, and my body tingled with wanting you.
“I’ll marry you,” you said once, “if you can’t find anyone else.”
I laughed because I thought you were kidding. You couldn’t even propose right.
It was the last push on a decaying orbit. I was not your fallback option. From the time you said that, our path downwards was guaranteed, calculable. We fought about the phone bill, Chinese leftovers, a broken plate that didn’t get swept up. When you told me about your new job repairing relativity shuttles, I was secretly glad. Your work would take you to Reno. Out of my path.
I was completely over you, over us—or at least I was then, when you left. I was on the rebound, ready for someone new.
Gunther, the German engineer, was everything you weren’t. So I married him. Once you knew his first few digits, they repeated in a predictable pattern. He was a wonderful father for our two sons. I thought of you sometimes as I raised my boys, perfect squares in their rational world. I never forgot you.
Thanks to genetics, we expected Gunther’s heart problems before they happened. He lasted twenty-five years with me, then slipped away. My kids were on their own by then, and I had time and money. I was free to choose irrationally, and so I took up waterskiing.
When you came back, I was surprised you came to my door—and even more surprised that you wanted me. I didn’t think you’d stay with me—a hot young thirty-something, with this dried-out old lady. You kept saying you liked my maturity, you found me sexy. But it was different for me. I saw you like my kids. More like a son than a mate.
That’s a terrible proposal. It makes a woman feel like you’re just putting up with her. I
But I married you anyway. You wanted to be with me, you said. All your recent thoughts told you so. My age didn’t matter—you still wanted
As for me, now I had what I’d always wanted—but it wasn’t what I thought it would be.
One night after we made love on the beach, I watched the stars. They shone with light from billions of years ago. The stars offered us time apart. That’s why I sold everything I had—to see what you’d seen.
The new relativity shuttles were even faster than yours had been, and now they were open to tourists. It had been forty years here, after all. I’m sorry I didn’t leave a note.
I figured it was all relative.
Gunther was always patient with me. Slow. He’d wait for me to orgasm, like he was holding a car door open for me, and then he’d finish quickly and silently. Sometimes I pretended he was you to make things more exciting. Once I pretended he was Albert Einstein. It was the accent, I swear.
With you, the electromagnetic pull bonded us together. We could ionize briefly, visiting other molecules and forming weak bonds—but we always came back together, circling each other endlessly.
An electron and a proton. You and me.
For a long time I thought I was the electron, spinning wild patterns around you. Then I realized the electron was you, because I always knew either where you were or how fast you were going, but never both.
So I left you and went to the stars, like you’d done. Alpha Centauri! The brilliant star burned into my mind. It was a vacation for me, a short time away from Earth. For the first time, I saw the lights up close. The luxury ship went 99% the speed of light. Much faster than you had gone, faster than before.
I figured you’d be dead once I got back. It simplified things. Stopped the fighting. You’d be ashes, like you’d always wanted. I wouldn’t even have to see your body. I thought about it, as I looked through the viewport, and realized that I was still thinking of you. That was when I understood that no matter how far I went or how fast, I still responded to you in every way.
Every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. Our bond pulls me back, and I love you.
Reasons why I have loved you:
1. Yes.
2. Yes, again.
3. Because you’re you.
None of these are love, perhaps, but they’re forces of physics. And if love isn’t subject to physics, then it has no grounding in our universe. I can’t believe that’s true.
Just when I got back, you left again, like one metal ball clacking another —the opposite side of our kinetic motion toy. You were off for the Andromeda Galaxy, moving at 99.38% the speed of light.
Simpler, indeed. I was sixty-eight. You were gone.
It was time to move on.
The world had changed since I left. The human lifespan was up to 150 years. I hadn’t imagined this possibility. I had decades left for music, art, whatever I dreamed of. My health was good—they killed a malignant breast tumor and grew me a new liver, twice—but otherwise, my body kept working for years.
But my nervous system paralysis—that was incurable. I opted for cryogenesis, hoping they’d find a cure. If they did, years from now, they’d revive me and heal me.
It was exciting. I wondered if it’d be hard to fall asleep, like Christmas Eve—not knowing what Christmas Day would bring. But of course the freezing was instant. As I lay down in the cryochamber I thought to myself: Reno.
