corollary

cold, never dreamless, and i should be learning spectral theory, not writing

I should be studying right now. But the window is open and the air is cold, and I can’t tell if I dread winter or want it. Maybe both. Maybe neither. There is nothing else to say except that I dream of people who don’t exist anymore and think of people who still do, though they feel equally unreal. Sometimes there is an intersection between A ∩ B. Where A is someone I haven’t known for years, and B is someone who exists at the periphery of my life. I am supposed to be learning spectral theory. The words land somewhere. Never on me. I understand nothing except the neglect of winter. I walk the lanes of campus, and the white avoids me. I close my eyes and wish for something catastrophic or for being young again. Both feel abstract.

I watch my brother sleep during night shifts. The room is quiet and I don’t remember what I’m supposed to feel. In the weeks before my sister’s birthday, I forget she exists, then remember, and it doesn’t change anything internally. New lovers don’t exist. Or if they do, they exist like {0} does. Present only because something has to fill a space. I don’t know if I’m afraid of that or just identifying it, the way you recognize a shape without understanding the object.

My professor talks about a dead mathematician. Évariste Galois. He wrote theories no one believed and then died in a duel. The story is supposed to mean something, but it passes through me. He worked on the thing until the night before. That part catches for a second. Not because it’s sad or inspiring, but because it’s final. I don’t pity him. I don’t admire him. The narrative just ends. His theory mattered later. He didn’t get to know that.

I write poetry sometimes, but all I do is copy down memories I haven’t experienced. I sleep. I have dreams that feel like someone else’s thoughts looping through. I dream of people I used to know, of theorems that cannot exist, of proofs I will never understand, of numbers that cannot be true under conditions that aren’t English. None of the dreams insist on being important. I dream of him after five years. We meet between orthogonal grocery aisles, and we both stop because movement doesn’t feel necessary. I try to remember what it meant to integrate the self, and I think maybe the integral was equal to him at some point. I must have believed that. I must have spent years trying to show it. All the conditional phrases—therefore, if, suppose, if and only if—all find themselves underwater. I only realized later, the integral of myself doesn’t exist when he’s in it. When I remove him, the integral exists.

\( \int_{\text{self}} d(\text{life}) \notin \mathbb{R} \qquad \text{if } \text{him} \in \text{self} \)

Corollary:

\(\int_{\text{self}} d(\text{life}) = \text{cold} \qquad \text{if } \text{him} \notin \text{self}\)

¹

The self is cold because the room is 17 degrees. The room is 17 degrees because the thermostat is off. The thermostat is off because I opened the window. I opened the window because cold seemed like something that would wake me up.

Eventually the cold stops being anything. It’s just temperature. Mute and undefinable by anything that should’ve been important an hour ago. Just as staring at a problem for so long becomes lines and symbols without meaning. I leave the window open. I forget to close it. Remembering doesn’t imply fixing. The room cools slowly, and I’m not waiting for warmth or resisting it. I exist somewhere in the room, and the cold exists somewhere else, and the contact point is unclear. Maybe it’s sinking into me. Maybe I’m sinking into it. Or maybe there’s nothing to separate in the first place.

The window stays open. The room stays cold. I stay here. The chapter is still on spectral theory. When I go to sleep, I dream of Galois, and in the dream he behaves as a function at its limit, certain of me without ever touching me. And when I wake up, I wonder if I could ever do the same.

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Journal entry. As always, thank you virgins for reading. I’m supposed to be taking a break from substack but I think I desperately needed a break from studying.

1. Undefined due to unnecessary inclusion of irrelevant terms: him. After exclusion, evaluation is trivial: cold.