ZERO
“Zero
is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite, yin and
yang”. Charles Seif.
“A penny for your thoughts”. My
mind had wandered off, so I slowly closed
the book.
I am Penny, but my friends from
long ago used to tease me, for my thin build and quick wit calling me pencil. I
looked out at the falling snow, gently coating the roads smothering all sound.
It had been twenty two years and then some, if you counted the days. Memory has
a way of blowing away fluff leaving moments clear, covering it again, just as
in a snow storm.
Those words tinkled with clarity
again today, just as it had on that fall morning twenty-two years back. “A
penny for your thoughts”, David had said at the bus stop. A few of us were waiting
for the bus back to school after our break. David and I became friends during
that final semester at college, and rather quickly slid down to marriage.
It was to be today or never, well almost.
This snow will delay my meeting with the attorney. Guess a day this way or that
doesn’t matter when you are looking at a whole new life ahead. Questions with
no clear answers swim around in my head, swirls of cold snow coat my thoughts
chilling them to inaction.
It was one year ago in March on a
cold day that I had considered distance as an evolutionary blessing. Yes, last
March it was cold and grey, an overhang of gloom had settled in to steady the
clouds.
There I was, my pillow hugging my
head that just would not stop. I had to stop thinking or die. I had tried for a
whole year, to stop all thought, but they just were like weeds, coming alive in
moments and ever so frequent too. Yet, they had stayed dormant for so long that
I had forgotten that thoughts could exist.
“Penny, indeed,--an apt name your parents
found. –You worthless bumbling idiot…zero now that fits --just like the ones
you produced, all good for nothing…” David my husband muttered his disgust that
slid down the banisters as he walked up the stairs to his bedroom.
He would be leaving in the morning
on a trip to start his new job in Florida
We are a family and families come
through always. Of course every family has its ups and downs. Being transformed
from penny to a blank.—to nothing, to zero. Guess I could perceive myself as nothing
but a floating life form in a vacuum, waiting for death, one day to the next. I
tried, I truly tried to stop thinking, but I had loved infinity from the first
time I wrote it, those slow curves brimming with possibilities.
Now I have to choose between zero
and infinity, and then again may be I don’t have to. David always sleeps in the
master bedroom and I use the spare bedroom or the sofa, carrying my blanket and
pillow with me. That night I chose the spare room. I was in a phase with a
burst of nightmares. I like nightmares because it is not the death of sleep...
I woke with a rather vague dream,
but still it startled me. The darkness cast odd shapes on the wall as it hugged
the cold air. Shifting in bed I heard a door close. Then as I drifted back to sleepy comfort, Eva
my daughter screamed; rather a muffled whiny cry of “mommy I am scared, mommy”
as I came up to wakefulness.
“It’s just a bad dream little one”,
I whispered then as I rocked her to sleep. I held her nine years of fears and
smoothed away the hair from her forehead as I scanned the darkness. I saw the
darkness cluster into shape and slide into David’s bed.
I lay there listening to every
creak of a bed, every movement, as each room waited for light. David, he would
leave by three AM , leaving
me freedom to sleep for four hours before I got up to go to work. Eva would wake
too and I would watch her get on the bus, before I left.
I closed Eva’s bed room door, then
moved my purse with our passports and IDs from the pillow to her book bag and
pushed it further back under her bed. Then I lay down on the floor, placing my
feet firm against the closed bed room door.
I guess a choice of sorts had
morphed from my thoughts. The snow continued to pile higher, blown about in the
cold retreating darkness. I would have
to reschedule my appointment. Slowly I moved to the phone as the Zero in me unraveled
to form a different curve.
