Part I : Attraction (Is this love? Is this gravity?)
It's a funny thing, attraction. Like, what is it, really? We're all pulled towards things. Magnets stick to refrigerators (thanks to the alignment of their atomic dipoles, by the way – tiny little magnets pointing the same way, creating a bigger one!). Static electricity makes balloons cling to your hair (electrons jumping ship from your hair to the balloon, creating opposite charges that attract!). And me? Well, I seem to be orbiting around…her.
Her name is Anya, another girl I met. We met in a Physics Group chat. See that's where all the magic started. I try to avoid calling it a simple attraction, because that feels… inadequate. It's more complicated than a simple push and pull. It's like trying to explain gravity.
See, most people think gravity is just this invisible force, like a cosmic rope pulling everything down. But that's not really how it works. Think of it more like this: imagine space itself as a giant trampoline and if we jumped on it. Now, imagine you put a bowling ball in the middle. The trampoline dips, right? That’s what massive objects like planets and stars do to space; they warp it. So, when you roll a marble nearby, it doesn't get pulled towards the bowling ball. It just follows the curve of the trampoline. The marble thinks it's moving in a straight line, but space itself is curved!
Einstein showed us that time is related to this too. Time isn't some universal clock ticking at the same rate for everyone. It's relative! The stronger the gravity, the slower time passes. So, technically, time moves slightly slower for someone standing on the ground floor of a building than for someone on the top floor! (Don't get any ideas about slowing down aging that way, though. The difference is minuscule.)
So, maybe my attraction to Anya isn't just some chemical reaction in my brain (though those certainly play a part! Dopamine and norepinephrine, I'm looking at you!). Maybe it's something deeper. Maybe it's spacetime itself bending around her, subtly drawing me in and pulling me towards her.
Maybe it's the fact that she laughs at my terrible science jokes ("What do you call a lazy kangaroo? Pouch potato!"), or the way her eyes crinkle when she's deep in thought, or the way she can explain quantum entanglement in a way that even I almost understand.
Maybe it's not just attraction. Maybe it's…inevitable. Like a rock succumbing to Earth's gravitational embrace, I'm falling. Fast.
Part II : Why Random is Not So Random?
Einstein famously said, "God does not play dice with the universe." He meant that, at a fundamental level, everything is governed by laws, even if those laws are incredibly complex and we don't fully
understand them yet. He was arguing against the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, believing there had to be a deeper, deterministic explanation for the universe's quirks.
I get his point. But honestly, sometimes this universe feels like a cosmic roulette wheel spinning wildly. Think about it. We exist on a tiny blue marble, orbiting a mediocre star, in a galaxy among billions of others, in a universe that might be one of many. Isn't that a bit… improbable? A total fluke?
Yet, here we are. From the Big Bang to the present moment, an incredibly specific chain of events had to occur precisely as they did for you to be reading these words right now. If a single electron had wiggled in a slightly different way billions of years ago, maybe you'd be reading about talking cats instead. Random, right?
But then I think about how those seemingly random events can snowball into something significant. Someone, somewhere, had the random idea to heat up sand. Sounds boring, right? Except that led to glass! And without glass, we wouldn't have lenses. No lenses mean no telescopes, no microscopes, no eyeglasses, which means a whole lot of people would be squinting and bumping into things.
And if no one had thought of glass, would this be her name I saw on my phone as she sent a meme about some random episode of "The Office" which led to a friendship, that led to a coffee date, that led to…well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
I think about small things, like the fact that if the tectonic plates hadn't shifted just so millions of years ago, my brother ,my cousin and my best friend wouldn’t have moved away to foreign country. From melting sand to building telescopes, from tectonic plates shifting to losing touch with friends, from a random meme to a blossoming romance, it's all connected in a weird, chaotic web. It’s like some cosmic Rube Goldberg machine, where a tiny nudge at the beginning sets off a chain reaction that leads to something amazing.
So, was meeting Anya truly random? Or was it the inevitable consequence of countless random events conspiring to bring us together? Sometimes I wonder if "random" is just a label we use for things we don't fully understand yet. And if "fate" is just a fancy word for the incredibly complex interplay of cause and effect. I don't know. I really don't. But whatever it is, I'm glad it happened.
Part III: Blind (Darkness)
Did you know, and this is going to sound super ominous, that the vast majority of the universe is invisible? I'm talking about dark matter and dark energy, which together make up about 95% of everything out there. We can't see them, because they don't interact with light the way normal matter does. They don't absorb, reflect, or emit electromagnetic radiation. It's like they're playing cosmic hide-and-seek, and they're really, really good at it.
And then there are black holes. These are regions of spacetime where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape. They're like cosmic vacuum cleaners, gobbling up everything in their vicinity. The boundary beyond which escape is impossible is known as the event horizon. Inside the event horizon, all the known laws of physics seem to break down. Spooky, right?
People often say that love is blind, and while that's a cliché, there's a grain of truth to it. When you're head-over-heels for someone, it's easy to overlook their flaws. You see them through rose-tinted glasses (or perhaps more accurately, through photon-tinted glasses!).
I used to think that was nonsense. That love should be clear-sighted, not blinding. But now, I'm not so sure. Maybe love is a little bit like a black hole. You pour your energy, your attention, your affection into it, and sometimes…it doesn't seem to come back. It feels like a one-way street.
I sent Anya a long heartfelt text explaining how I was feeling, and all i got was a "Yeah, good for you". That felt a little disheartening. Was I pouring all my energy into a void?
But then I remember those scientists who managed to "photograph" a black hole. It wasn’t a direct picture, of course. It was a composite image created by analyzing the radio waves emitted from the superheated gas swirling around the black hole's event horizon. They could see the effect of the black hole, even though they couldn't see the black hole itself and also no one could guarantee that it exists.
Maybe that's what love is like. You might not always get the immediate validation you expect. You might feel like you're shouting into the void. But if you're patient, if you pay attention, you can still see the effects. The way her face lights up when I tell her a corny joke. The way she leans in a little closer when we’re talking. The way she always remembers my birthday, even though I'm terrible with dates. These are the subtle signs, the faint whispers of light that suggest something is there, even if it's hidden in darkness.
And if love is like a black hole, well, maybe that's not so bad. Black holes might be destructive, consuming everything in their path, but they're also incredibly powerful. They can shape galaxies, trigger star formation, and create some of the most energetic phenomena in the universe.
Maybe love has that kind of potential too. The potential to transform us, to push us beyond our limits, to create something new and beautiful out of the chaos. Even if it means getting a little… blind.
Okay, buckle up, because we're diving into the cosmos, love, and a hefty dose of existentialism. Prepare for liftoff!
Part iv . Denial
"Yeah, good for you." Anya's text echoed in my brain, a cosmic microwave background radiation of indifference. It was less "Big Bang" and more "Big Dud." But, like a good scientist facing unexpected data, I refused to abandon my hypothesis: Anya loved me. Obviously.
I thought about the placebo effect. It’s real! Even if a sugar pill does nothing chemically, the belief that it works can trigger physiological changes. Maybe Anya's love was a subtle placebo, working on me at a quantum level! Her kindness was the sugar, my belief the catalyst, and boom – love! Okay, maybe I was stretching the analogy, but hey, that's science – testing the limits!
I remembered reading about confirmation bias. It's this annoying tendency we humans have to cherry-pick information that supports what we already believe while conveniently ignoring the rest. My brain was a master confirmation bias artist. Anya opened the door for me once? Proof of love!
She laughed at my joke about Schrödinger's cat? Undeniable affection! That ‘good for you’ text? Just her way of being…supportive! Yes, that was it! She was being supportive. She knew I was going through a period of intense emotional openness and wanted to encourage my journey.
It was just like the ongoing debate about the existence of Planet Nine. Astronomers have noticed gravitational anomalies in the outer solar system that suggest a large, unseen planet is lurking out there. But no one has actually seen it. Yet! Does that mean it doesn't exist? Of course not! It just means we haven't found the right telescope or the right angle yet. Anya's love was Planet Nine. I just needed to adjust my instruments and keep searching for the evidence. Her "good for you" was just eluding capture.
And anyway, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Right? Right! I am just being scientifically objective.
V. Realization
The universe, as Carl Sagan famously said, is not required to be understandable. And neither, it seemed, was Anya. I was furiously googling "Signs She Secretly Loves You (Definitely Working in 2018!)" when I stumbled upon a quote from the Upanishads. Something about how the self is like a charioteer on a chariot, the body being the chariot itself. The senses are the horses and the mind is the reins. If the charioteer is not careful, the horses will run wild and pull the chariot into a ditch.
The horses were running wild. My senses were screaming "Anya loves you!" while my mind, clouded by this desperate hope, had dropped the reins ages ago.
Then it hit me. Like a rogue asteroid impacting the Earth. Like the delayed realization that you just walked into a spider web. It was all so painfully, blindingly obvious. Anya didn’t love me. She was being nice. Empathetic. A good person. Not a lovestruck Juliet pining for her Romeo.
I had been so busy trying to force the data to fit my preconceived theory, I had completely ignored the glaring truth. It was like trying to prove the Earth was flat when all the evidence pointed to a sphere. I was clinging to outdated models, refusing to accept the heliocentric reality of the situation.
The more I read, the more I understood. The Vedas, the Upanishads, the concept of cyclical time… It wasn't about just this life, this moment, this crush. It was about the eternal dance of creation and destruction, of love and loss, of everything happening again and again. What had happened, what was happening, and what will happen, already happened. According to the Hindu belief, there is no start nor end in time.
And in this cosmic cycle, Anya and I were not destined for romantic entanglement. Our paths crossed, we shared moments, but her destiny was not interwoven with mine in that way. And I know I came across Anya for a reason, nothing is a coincidence.
But a question came to my mind, why did I come across her ? If everything has happened and will happen anyway ? Is it useless to even breathe ? If the whole life is a cycle and we are just running in circles ?
VI. Acceptance
The initial despair morphed into a reluctant acceptance. It was like finally grasping the concept of entropy. The universe tends towards disorder. Things fall apart. Stars burn out. Ice cream melts. And sometimes, love isn't reciprocated. It's just the natural course of things.
But understanding entropy doesn’t mean wallowing in a puddle of melted ice cream. It means appreciating the sweetness while it lasts and understanding that new, equally delicious experiences are always on the horizon.
I realized that trying to force Anya to fit into my romantic narrative was not only unfair to her, but also incredibly limiting for me. I had been so focused on what I wanted to happen, I had completely overlooked the beauty of what was actually unfolding.
I remembered studying quantum entanglement. Two particles, linked in such a way that they instantly affect each other, no matter how far apart they are. It's spooky, as Einstein famously said. But it also suggests a deeper connection, a fundamental unity that underlies all things. Just because Anya and I weren’t romantically entangled didn't mean we weren’t connected on some other level, as friends, as people who shared a brief but meaningful moment in space-time. Good things are coming to me.
And about the looping of time, and everything happened and will happen again. I found a solution to my question about the reason of coming across her.
The loop is about the why, not the what. It's not about the fact that the same events might happen again and again. It's about the reason behind those events. Are we learning from them? Are we growing? Are we evolving into better versions of ourselves? Or are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes, trapped in an endless cycle of suffering? The loop of life will not break until we understand it's not about what happens but it's all about why it happens.
VII . Move On
So, I decided to break free from the orbit of unrequited longing and chart a new course. Like the Voyager spacecraft, I was venturing into the unknown, armed with new knowledge and a slightly bruised but ultimately resilient heart.
I started focusing on the things that truly mattered. My friends, my family, my work. I reconnected with my love for astronomy and spent hours gazing at the night sky, marveling at the sheer scale and beauty of the cosmos. I took a pottery class and discovered that I was surprisingly good at shaping clay (though my first attempt looked suspiciously like a lopsided black hole). I even volunteered at a local animal shelter, where I was licked and drooled upon by an enthusiastic pack of furry therapists.
I learned to accept joy and pain with equal measure. Just like a sine wave alternates from peak to trough, life is a constant cycle of ups and downs. And just like the wave itself, it's the movement, the vibration, that gives it its essence.
I understand that everything happens for a reason. and I accepted that Anya is not my destiny.
I haven’t stopped believing in love. But now, I understand that love isn't a force to be controlled or manipulated. It's a force to be understood and respected. It's a cosmic phenomenon, as mysterious and awe-inspiring as the universe itself.
And like the scientists studying dark matter and black holes, I'm content to observe its effects, to learn from its mysteries, and to embrace the unknown. Because who knows? Maybe, just maybe, there’s a whole new galaxy of love waiting to be discovered.
The story is continuing, and I am the writer.