woke up with a very bad feeling. bad sign. and now i am listening to john mayer and jamie cullum songs as breakfast. totally bad luck. so i decided to go online, searching for love letters. dunno why, i just did. so i "found" a love letter which so tickly.
LOVE LETTER TO A CHEMIST
by Sierra Bellows
as a student of science, you tell me that love is chemical. i imagine bright yellow sugar crystals, like shards of rock candy, gushing through my blood stream. with their sparkling sharp edges, they flood my brain and make me drunk and unwieldy. thay fizz and froth as they react with the hidden deposits of disappointment that have built up between the edges, in the deeper crevices and unventilated parts of me. they dissolve in the warm wet of my wiring and their tiniest parts drift in and out of my cells, fitting into the odd shaped doors and windows of the cell wall.
how much do you love me? let me count the ways. ag + si + uuh + as. and i regret never learning the periodic table. i have to look it up. ag is silver. si is silicone, the second most plentiful element, it is found in sand. uub is ununbium, which has no known uses and is made by man. i am surprised that so many elements are man-made, manufactured. but i shouldnt be surprised about love. and the last part is arsenic. a poison that makes my head spin and awakens the desire to wrap you in my arms and sleep forever.
in the lab, you wear a white coat and goggles to protect your eyes. you tic your hair back. there is a safety shower. with me, your hair is down and we touch each others naked skin, unprotected and permeable. there is a white powder caught between the folds of your fingerprints and as you trace your fingers over my skin, you leave a thin coating of elation. it travels under my skin; it follows the meridians, and finds my centre, my core. there are other white powders, other promises for rapture that bring this same quickening of the pulse, the flushing, and the tingling. these are illicit chemicals, illegal. but they have never worked on me, not like this. there is danger here too, there is addiction. when i think of you, the inside of my chest becomes awash in some caustic compound, there is heat and the sensation of burning. for weeks, i am agitated, high all night on the thought of you. your physical presence has blazed an afterimage on my body. the pattern of you- the electrical charge, dendrite to dendrite the unique chemistry in the synaptic gap - has changed the shape of me and i am delirious.
in the dark, you whisper secrets, you tell me how ununbium was so recently discovered. i marvel at something so rare and so new.
you entwine your hands with mine and explain compounds. when we stop talking, you make my body a beaker for your potion; you mix me and stir me, you heat me to boiling, you cool me to freezing, and you pour me out. you are the mad scientist - with the colourful liquids, the complicated machines with hundreds of glass tubes, and the dry ice smoke - with a crazy recipe for ecstasy. i am thankful for your knowledge, your ability to measure, and your experimentation.
but what have i taught you, my student of science? i tell you love is never having to say you're sorry. i tell you love is a many splendored thing. i tell you love is a four-letter word. but you have never liked movie allusion or literary references and you turn away. and i am forced to wonder if this thing, that is you and me, has a half-life. could it leave me too fragile, like the eggs of poisoned birds? eggs with shells that break when birds try to incubate them. when i ask you, you say you know little about biology. i ask you: what is the atomic weight you your feeling for me? i nag you. i buy books about biology and cinema. i stop listening to your talk of lattice energies and electron affinities. i ask you why a chemist so good at mixing cant make decent pancake batter. i am like a wayward electron, falling out of orbit around you. i suggest couples counseling. you suggest classes in biological chemistry.
in the end, you tell me you love me as much as uuu. i ask: how much is that? but you wont say. i tell you that this love talk of months ago doesnt cut it anymore, that love isnt ag + si + uub + as. but you just shake your head and keep quiet. i am forced to go to the reference library. i turn thin pages in fat books. i look and search. i read and wonder: how much is uuu? and then i find it:
isolation of an observable quantity of unununium has never been achieved, and may well never be.
your love for me is so minute that it cant be observed? and you wouldnt even tell it to my face, you let me find out alone among books you likely love more than you love me. i cry in the deep quiet of the library and taste the nacl of my tears.
so, my dear student of science, though your love is gone, mine still lingers like a heavy metal. a memory or as harp blow will dislodge yellow sugar crystals of feeling from the dark recesses and undersides of me. and they will flow through their old passageways: the heart and the mind.
this is the original love letter
little attentions from mrs. siegmund to mr. siegmund (mr. siegmund was a psychologist)
isnt that romantic? never thought if chemistry would be this romantic. though i learned chemistry, i never used it to pronounce the romance side of me. maybe i should try one :p
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