There’s something wrong with me she said. Who is she? Doesn’t matter. The names and faces keep changing. I told her as such the last time. She said that was part of the problem. Or maybe she said it was a symptom. Not that important.

It’s not healthy she said, meaning my appetite for women. A man shouldn’t feel compelled to flit from bird to bird like a tree. He ought to try settle down some and try growing some roots. I might have mixed some of that up. I wasn’t paying much attention. She was beginning to bore me again.

You’re a man whore, one of her said to me once. Something about double standards for men and women, but I never said she couldn’t do the same. I never cared much for what she did outside of when I craved her. What do I care what society thinks you ought to do when I dont care what it thinks what I ought to do? That’s what I told her but she wasn’t satisfied. She made like a tree and left.

Another one sobbed all night in my bed. I slept just fine beside her. Did I feel bad for her? Sure. But I had no part in her self-deceptions. Dont put promises on me that I never made. I never lied once.

It’s a hunger. I tried to explain it in terms she might understand: women eat too right? You crave a thing so you go get it and eat it: I consume women in the same way. I enjoy the experience. Savour the taste of every individual bite. Sometimes one even grabs hold of me and I feast on it for months at a time. It’s nothing personal. Women and men must eat to live.

We are not food, she said. As though she spoke for all of Her with one voice. Of course you’re not food, I’m not an imbecile. But how else do you explain something to someone when it doesnt ever make sense to them? Food is our common ground. You can’t expect every metaphor to work one-for-one. Plus she started it with the talk of my appetite and my being a tree. Or was that me? I get confused sometimes.

I remember her crying another time too. Thinking I’d changed this time. What’s there to change? A hungry man eats and is grateful for the meal. Why should there be an obligation to eat the same meal forever? Or to remember every meal? To remember all her names? I dont understand food. Maybe I dont understand trees or metaphors either. Or women and people. I do get confused sometimes.

They tell you it’s like a flutter in your gut when your feet expect a regular step and miss. Or when you catch yourself on a step that shouldn’t be there. But it’s not. It’s world shattering.

It’s a strange thing to be confronted by reality.

I was happily married to my wife for almost two decades before we divorced. She was a mathematician and I was a physicist. We met in university during a shared lecture on applied maths. It was a small theatre and she caught me staring multiple times. We spoke afterwards, clumsily. She invited me out to a bar crawl and I declined. Instead we spent all night bickering in her common room – what was more fundamental in nature, maths or physics? She was wrong: it’s physics. Our worlds collided that day.

Until near the end, our marriage was largely of little note. We had no children and enjoyed working in each other’s company when we could. There were few arguments. We flirted over playfought existential philosophy – was maths discovered or invented? Would physics ever end?

Then came QMind. It was the most powerful computer ever built and it was built only for one thing: mathematics. QMind was no mere tool: it was a mathematician in its own right. It would conceptualise, connect, prove and journal its billions of findings. It was the atomic bomb to mankind’s pistol and it didn’t take long for it to outproduce our species’ collective contributions in the field.

I suppose QMind shattered my wife’s world. Boom. No more maths. Picture that.

I didn’t understand it then. In fact, I dreamed of living to see the day we fully understood the physical world. I tried to reassure my wife, told her that as we uncovered more of the universe’s fundamental nature, we would have to create more maths. But she knew there was no beating QMind. It broke her.

My wife began to spend long hours at work. It was only then that reality confronted me for the first time.

We live in such a narrow slice of existence and know so very little. We go about our daily lives, not knowing all the pieces in our phones or the human cogs within our institutions. So many trains kept on the tracks, kept on time by so many invisible conductors. And all of them stay invisible so long as it all goes according to plan.

My wife was cheating on me with a colleague of hers. Boom. Her world had shattered and so she’d chosen to shatter mine.

A thing like that sounds trivial when overheard in a pub. So what? Find someone better and move on. But the reality of reality is complicated. Had she changed so much to want to hurt me so? Had she always been this person? How could one act ripple out and disturb so much? I didn’t just question her, but our past, the past itself, and then myself. She wasn’t whom she’d claimed and vowed to be. Our relationship was false, built on unsound foundations. What we had between us was false. All the words and actions shared meant different things now. And who was I that could be so lacking in my judgement? Not the same I I had presumed to be all this time.

We separated quickly and quietly. And then QMind struck again.

The thing about science is it isn’t about the body of knowledge – that list of whats and facts. It’s about the process. You guess at a thing and plug away at disproving what you can. You rule out the ideas one by one, over and over again, clipping off the branches of possibility. And then over a long enough timeline, the approximation of the truth within your model or body of knowledge hopefully approaches the actual Truth. But it’s never the Truth itself. Only the Truth is the Truth. It’s just a giant simulated model.

I wish I could’ve explained that clearly to my wife. Maybe it might have changed things. If she understood that the maths was not the reality but a heuristic – only reality was reality. Most likely it would’ve made no difference.

Even understanding it myself, I shudder at the chaos of unburnished Truth. Beyond our man-made rules and laws is the real thing. It hides during everyday life. A physicist revels in the intellectual thought of approaching Truth. But drop him in the midst of it, and he falls apart. All it takes is one late train.

QMind released its latest findings. Its AI network had been linked to a supercollider around Jupiter. As it processed the data, it reached a consensus. QMind had concluded there were no more fundamental particles to be found beyond what it had discovered. It had unified general relativity and quantum mechanics to build a Theory of Everything. There were no alternative interpretations of the universe left.

And yet there were still some physical anomalies. Anomalies with no higher level explanation available to them now. They simply existed, unaccounted for. Boom.

It drove me mad, again. QMind had divided the universe into something understandable and come up with some truly indivisible parts. I emailed these anomalous remainders to my wife, hoping my despair might be her hope.

It’s a strange thing to be confronted by reality.

Twenty six.

I swore I’d moved on.

‘What?’ cried Selina. The fishing line snapped, whipping the pair of us off our feet. Asses sore and elbows torn from the jagged stone steps of the communal pond.

‘Nothing’, I said and pushed her off me. And soon enough we were back to popping water lily bulbs and counting how many of the tadpoles had grown legs. We were six then.

A few years later we had chased a snake to its nest in our little boat. We killed it with our paddles, one apiece - but not before tipping overboard, all the frenzied thrashing included. As we emerged from the murky pond as victors waving our paddles (boat abandoned for the day), I felt a sharp tug in my foot and yelped. Selina turned around, dead snake draped over her shoulders like a Hollywood starlet’s fur and laughed. Embedded in my sole was our old fishing hook, snapped line and all. 

Her father caught us striding (and limping) into the village. How we cried when he beat us both. My own father nodded in approval as he tended to my foot. Of who, I was never very sure.

‘When I leave this village I’m never coming back.’ That’s what she told me that night. Thunder growled and I believed her. The air was charged and I told her ‘I’ll leave too.’

We were sixteen when my father phoned Selina’s. Theirs was the only telephone in the village at the time. We had been skipping rocks on the way back from school. Selina’s mother damn near dragged us the whole way by the ear when she found us.

‘Tell your mother to pack her things, son. You’re joining me in London.’

I remember how upset Selina was. We stomped puffer fish all week in near silence. ‘You’ll get your visa in no time.’

She didnt say anything. When I left we didn’t say goodbye.

Selina’s family followed not soon after. I remember it was the twenty sixth of a winter month because that was her favourite number.

They moved into a two bedroom flat not six minutes from ours. I shoved her face in the snow, she put it down my neck. I made her eat some. ‘That was fun’, she said and we walked home holding hands.

We went to different colleges but the same university. We kissed and fought and fucked the entire time, like only two halves of a whole could.

We were twenty six soon enough. I had saved a pretty penny for a ring. Christmas day we spent snuggled in bed rewatching old films. And the day after, on a snowy twenty sixth morning, I knelt on one knee and Selina walked away.

I hurt for a long time. The world became incomprehensible. I ran away with my medical degree stateside. Selina seemed to follow. I know because I followed her on social media like a maniac. We both zigzagged around the nation through the years, never within reach and neither of us reaching out. We darted between our respective bases in the US and our families in England and India. Her father wept for me.

We are thirty six now. As usual I am late for my flight. I’m okay with this. There’s something soothing about the dull rush of an airport. I sleep well in them. Still, I power through the travelators with a coffee in hand. There’s something to be said about making an effort.

I see a stewardess at my gate as I approach it. She looks mildly unhappy before she notices me and puts on her professional face. I am clearly the lone straggler they’re waiting on.

That’s when I hear that laugh. The laugh I havent heard in a decade. I would recognise it anywhere in the world. Much to the dismay of the stewardess, I turn around and head to the opposite gate. 

The sound of her voice reels me in. I am caught again on Selina’s hook.

Before I know it, I am hugging her and shaking her husband’s hand. Selina seems embarrassed and the gentleman is confused. I dont remember the words exchanged. Only the feeling of floating on air. It’s electric, like those old thundering nights.

I’m very happy for them, selfishly and selflessly so. I tell them as much, and explain I am very late. My father is ill and England awaits. Selina is headed back to India to visit her in-laws. 

They board their flight. We are separated again. The charged air dissipates and my feet find their way back to solid ground. I have missed my flight.

I am left standing at her gate. Gate twenty six. Thinking. I swore I’d moved on.