Camonghne Felix - Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation

As it turns out, nature has a formula that tells us when its an entitys time to die.

Theres even an equation for it, where size becomes rule and the laws of expiration must obey: take the mass of a system of organisms (a species of plant, all mammals); its metabolic rate (read: speed of entropy) is equal to its mass taken to three-fourths power.

Pythagoreans believed that numbers were an infinite, invisible, but radically real force in an ultimate but uncreated world of exponentially dynamic beings.

They believed that numbers, and to what rhythms we assign them, give birth to the ineffable, to the faithful. This is how we learn to hear beauty, how we come to know the nature of deficits, how we know what it means to be full, what it means to offer an abundance, and how to quantify the sin of greed.

This faith is what introduces the doctrines of Plato, and through Plato, Aristotles incarnations, and through that translation, western consciousness is born, and through western consciousness come these varying systems of order, these strange phenomena of persuasive appeal, then the Self gained a title, lending western civilization a way to feel, a way to comprehend the sequential mechanics of how each individual comes to know for certain their place and purpose in the world.

Of all artistic mediums, mine of choice is one of mathematical impulse, lyrics buoyed by the universal truth of the one and the two.

When I say I wanted to die, I do not mean it hyperbolically, metaphorically, or symbolicallyIm not trying to metaphorize an ache or insult the natural functioning of the mind. Memory makes me flawed in remembering, but this I can tell without mirage, without the phantasmagoria of misery.

One autonomous lonesome entity in a sea of other entities one day ventures out of its home, in which it dwells alone, and stumbles upon its ecological double. Bonded, the two leave their lonesome habitats and choose to reinhabit the orb of the living world as some new, mutated thing. One world, meeting another, entering another anew.

What two lovers do in the room of that third world is the math of it all.

I loved him, and it gave me a fever.

Aight, so boom:

The morning after his birthday, we lie lazy in the deep cusp of our bed, the suns tender touch grazing the fur of our bodies. I reach over to check the time on his phone instead of mine, mostly because his was closest, mainly because a pesky impulse primed me to look and I get giddy in my ancestors mischief. I press the phones home button to illuminate the screen, and as if summoned, one lone text flashes white across the face: Im so in love with you bby, I wish you were with me last night instead of her.

At first, I smile easy at the warmth of it. I love to know the one I love is loveda natural symptom of narcissism, or of gratitude. After a moment, a dawning flushes over me, the warm wisp of that easy morning suddenly plucked away, my pulse racing into disgust as I realize he lied, realizing I knew exactly who she was, the memory of a girl hed curiously and opaquely befriended just a few months before projecting from my memorys drunk archives. On my birthday she offered me a shot of a dry gin, the taste of her guilt like salt on my tongue.

I had asked him. I had asked him then, and he had lied.

Like an instant high, I feel myself losing my sense of time, colors ringing in my ears, the sun brighter than ever before. I shake him awake, shaking him, shaking him.

As he wakes, I see panic fill in on his brow. Who? he asks. What? Im in love with you, babe, cmon! except the tether is missing from his eye, he is lying again, right to my face, his betrothed, his promised one.

Breathing gets difficult then, and with all the ringing in my ears, thinking is an odd task. Something takes over and I lean into my autopilot, calling Her from his phone before I even know who Im calling. She answers, and I demand precision: I want to know what, I want to know for how long.

(Okay, tea: Apparently, he had beenplanning on leaving me. Apparently, she had been planning on waiting it out. That whole sad time, I had been planning on becoming his wife, so none of the data aligned, the margins too muddy to reconcile.)

Theres silence. Then the crushing wail of a million mournings. Then a collapse. From a view above the room, I watch myself melt into a foolish rage as Im being let in on a secret that had canceled me out, that made me the woman unwanted. All of a sudden, I am a child again, up in a flame I cant stop, an anger I cant manage.

I wanted him and I wanted him to be sorry and I wanted to be a woman who could go glamorously unaffected by such blatant ignorance, because how dare he eclipse me, make me ugly, how dare she even fucking breathe. I wanted Her ruined. I wanted Her flattened.

And I wanted to fucking die.