Cosmological Constant

Her mother used to plan their meals on index cards, pinned on the refrigerator door, charted into boxes constructed from black ink and rulers: Monday breakfast, Monday lunch, Monday dinner; Tuesday breakfast, Tuesday lunch, Tuesday dinner; Wednesday and so on. It made her believe, for a time, that they had access to an endless supply of food and that everything could be planned. Every vegetable, spice, and sauce could be neatly categorized to form a box on a date on a week, for years.

At night, her mother assured her: There is nothing to fear.

Thereafter whenever she was scared she comforted herself with compiling a list of things she wrote down on her notebook:

Sour cream, white cheese, a Dell laptop, a Japanese song, the neighbor’s laundry, magnets, buttons, silverware, baskets, colors, feelings, my life, the world, the Milky Way, endless spiral…

…

One day in school someone asked their Physics professor about space and things they had no real answer for. They passed around an article, exchanged opinions, wondered at the mathematical equations that only made sense with words.

For several nights after, she clutched her thin blanket around herself, thinking to herself:

The universe is expanding, and to herself, she noted:

Wind, songs, typewriters, keys, sounds, doorsteps, blue doors, beige doors, yellow-silled windows, grills, red, rust, metal, alchemy, e-mails, screens, glares, eyes, statistics, corners, midpoints, entries, exits, diffusion, anxiety, context, space, space, space!

…

In the morning, twenty years-old, she began to see her mother no longer planned their meals. What was there, what could be mixed together, thrown together with salt, was served. It was not a lack of love but a failing of the senses, dulled over the years, straining their smiles, convincing their heartstrings that dying and living were but emotions.

She went, she lived, she rejoiced, notebook discarded, perhaps destroyed. One night, in the future, her daughter will ask her if she can have mamon for breakfast tomorrow, and her smile will sag, remembering rulers, black lines, neat little boxes, expansion: the universe.

Life, alive, tags, names, cartoons, rejection, failure, stunted, railway, murder, telephones, vocabulary, boredom, judgment, gossip, commitment, roofs, doors, and walls, walls, walls.