Valentines: “General Theory of Relativity, in Two Sections” by Timothy Gomez

GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY, IN TWO SECTIONS

block universe theory in a shoebox

some people believe it’s spirits, others believe it’s layers of lives placed upon each other. double exposures. that’s not nana’s ghost, it’s nana. in her loose nightgown, shouting obscenities at her mat-furred poodle. and we are in her space, she in ours. in this house, there is not the translucent body of a partner once scorned, there is only a partner being scorned. 

we are both here. 

we are both hearing each other and wondering how the other was wronged. what it would take to make the other disperse. curtains of dust. to bring the other to enough peace to move through whatever doors may be waiting. white or gold or fire. we burn sage. palo santo. pray to saint jude the apostle. the patron saint of lost causes. 

but there is no time. this is no now. we are only everything all at once. 

there is no getting rid of all the other lives piled onto each other. and though we don’t know, there may always be enough space for more. 

as my mother packs her home, she finds boxes of other lives i am currently living. 

the life where i am buying tootsie roll pops for S who i saw race go-carts at the theme park last summer. she saw my small body in football pants and wrote, i liked you because of your cute butt.

the life where T and i play hooky on a spring day to watch that flick where a mammoth tries to out-walk extinction. we feel the warmth of skin and push against each other like icebergs. 

that life where L and i, separated by semesters and seasons, ship each other burned compact discs filled with longing. love’s an inside joke. love is coming home.

i worry sometimes of the ways these lives, thin like papel picado, muddle together. vibrant colors lost in the over-blending. i worry about the ways they drown each other out. the ways that i see the words on those pages, can feel the molecules of ink against the ridges of my fingers, and i know that i wrote them, that i am writing them. i know that they were written to me, that they are being written to me. 

and yet i don’t know how i became this muted. 

i want to rip through it all, move the clock hands slightly to tap a message to my other self: show me how you loved so well. 

if loving co-dependently never went out of style,

here’s what i would do: i would write letters. a million letters. packed carefully with hyperbole and grandeur. you are the only one i have ever loved in this particular way and the only one i ever will. i would buy a small plot of land with fertile dirt. build us a garden with the seasonal things. beardtongue. blue-eyed grass. jacarandas drenching our soil with purple. i know exactly what to say when you’re around.

phone calls that leak into dawn. ruin the next day’s work. 

bodies that layer into each other like weeks and lose the end to the beginning. our friends would ask where we’ve been. why we don’t come around no more, foo. and we would grin and apologize insincerely. 

we would get bank accounts, adopt a dog, talk of children that neither of us want. 

we would park on the darkest street in the town where we separately grew up, pull the hand brake and fall into each other like ghosts. 

cross country flights. leave good paying jobs to be with each other. quicksand into debt just to see each other. we would look at vintage rings we can’t afford, live in homes too big for our bodies, make promises bigger than rome. 
would this all be a trauma response? i am not arguing the counter.

i am merely positing that there’s something to tangling limbs and lives so tightly, so irreversibly, that to pull them apart means to pull a bit of skin with them. 

i want to love irresponsibly. 

i don’t mourn loss because i carry a piece of everyone i’ve ever loved with me, always. they of me as well. and i wonder if those pieces are infinite. if there will ever come a point when the penny tray is empty. 

take what you need, i used to say, uncertain of how much copper there would be to go around.

About Timothy Gomez

Timothy Gomez is a Chicano writer and educator. His prose and essays have appeared in various publications including No Tokens, The Boiler Journal, sin cesar, and Ed Post. He received his MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and currently teaches middle school English in Long Beach, CA.