Cabin Essence
by Jasmine Kaleka George wished he stayed at home instead of agreeing to meet with Cameron. Time had eaten their friendship like a flame swallows a field and spits it out. Maybe the past—which never seemed to stop happening—had made their bond murky like an overxeroxed pamphlet. Sometimes, George felt a longing for the sharper focus of their friendship's fresher days. He remembered the parched throat from endless harping on seemingly sophisticated topics—and the coolness of two consecutive quenches of tap water—and the tears welling from a mis-inhaled popcorn tuft up the nose, thrown from the dorm rooms other corner; the afternoon sunlit dust of that room—inside though the New Haven soil had warmed. Cameron's voice nagged George back to their current state as undesignated college graduates, full of existential nausea. “What I am trying to say is that physics is a complete and absolute lie,” Cameron said, “Einstein is an idiot.” Behind his owlish open eyes, belief radiated—like those days he carefully ladled hydrogen peroxide—with hungover shaking fingers—into test tubes to get the pH levels for catalase in animal tissue: the tension of pride. “What do you mean?” George asked, and then winced at his accidental encouragement. “I mean a group of Russian physicists discovered a particle that moves faster than the speed of light. Physics is pretty much built on the concept that there is nothing that can move faster than the speed of light. Yet suddenly, against the most unfathomable odds, this new discovery emerges. One particle that cannot even be detected by the naked eye moves at an unconquerable, impossible speed and dismantles a theory that shaped the way we once saw the world." Cameron's momentum waned a notch with every bit of phoned-in empiricism. He began to bore himself, “It only proves that this existence is hardly formulaic. Science, math… these things only exists to those who fear the unknown.” “Everyone fears the unknown,” George’s comforting tone could not disguise the coldness in these words. |
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