The radio.
Our physicist.
Non-distance.
The physicist on the radio says something about particles, about how two things that have touched can know each other across infinite distances, instantaneously, forever. I’m driving through Nebraska, where the sky is so wide it makes you understand why people used to think the earth was flat, and I think:
You’re in Tokyo, I am here, and that means nothing.
Because we already had our big bang, didn’t we? That summer when we were twenty-three and stupid enough to believe that proximity was the same thing as permanence. When your apartment was so small we had to breathe in shifts, when the heat made our skin stick together and we didn’t mind. We collided. We fused. And now, the physicist says, we’re bound by something that doesn’t care about space or time, something that moves faster than light because it doesn’t have to move at all. It just knows.
I don’t understand quantum physics. I barely passed high school chemistry. But I understand this: I know when you’re sick. Not because you tell me—we haven’t spoken in four years—but because my throat closes up on random Tuesdays. Because I wake up at 3 a.m. with a fever that isn’t mine.
If I were living in a country where health insurance didn’t cost an arm and a leg from your firstborn, some people around me might have advised me, You should go see a doctor. But they didn’t, and that doesn’t matter, because the doctors won’t have an explanation anyway. The frontier of this kind of science is so far, far in front, so avant garde, doctors who were taught on decades-old knowledge won’t get it; not even most of the physicists understand it, our particular physicist on the radio says.
Now, the Great Plains scroll past, endless and blonde. Somewhere over the Pacific, you’re probably drinking coffee in that café near Shimokitazawa, the one with the broken AC and the owner’s cat that hated everyone except you. Or maybe you’ve moved. Maybe you’re married now. Maybe you have a different café, a different cat, a different person whose skin you’ve learned by heart.
But I know—I know—you’re not sick anymore.
Last year, for two months, I felt like I was drowning on dry land. Woke up gasping. Couldn’t finish sentences. My friends said anxiety, my mother said therapy, but no one actually called anybody for an appointment, because, remember? I live in a country of “an arm and a leg from your firstborn.” And I don’t even have a whole firstborn! What if they demand the arm, the leg, and the firstborn?
Whatever pound of flesh they’re after, me being me, all I could do on that morning in March was making eggs. I was drowning and yet I had to eat. Isn’t that amazing? This was going to be another day of objectively inexplicable pain, only sort of explicable in the most non-scientific sense, and only to me…
But then, suddenly, I could breathe all the way to the bottom of my lungs. The air tasted clean. The eggs didn’t burn. I stood in my kitchen crying over something I didn’t understand, something that felt like a door opening in my chest.
You had beaten it, whatever it was. You had shed the weight that made you leave and made me stay. You were whole in a way that makes my throat ache with something I don’t have a word for. Not in English. Not in Japanese. Not in the language of particles that don’t know they’re particles.
Sometimes I wonder if it goes both ways. Somewhere in Tokyo, are you sitting in traffic and suddenly your chest loosens and you think, She’s okay? Can you taste my coffee going cold while I stare at my phone, not calling? Do you know that I know that you know?
The radio shifts to static, then country music, then nothing. Nebraska doesn’t end. The sky turns orange, then pink, then that particular shade of purple that only exists for ten minutes at dusk.
In physics, they say entangled particles aren’t sending signals to each other. There’s no “communication,” not in the sense as we know it. The connection goes deeper than that; they’re not two separate things anymore. They’re one entity, expressing itself in two locations. That’s why there really isn’t a thing that can be called “communication”; there is no other.
I pull into a rest stop. The air smells like diesel and sweet corn. Inside, the fluorescent lights make everything look like the laundromat we went to hungover, everything too bright and spinning. I buy bad coffee and stand in the parking lot, feeling the space between us collapse into nothing, into now, into always-has-been.
If we’re entangled because we exploded into each other and scattered across space, then distance is just another word for “same location.”
I get back in the car. Nebraska keeps not ending. Some scientists might say there’s no mysticism here, no poetry—just math, just the stubborn machinery of how matter behaves when it’s been intimate with other matter.
But I have a feeling that our physicist would disagree. He would say, Then they have never loved someone in a room too small for two people. You can tell, the dude is a romantic. He isn’t just one of the “some scientists.” He knows: great science, like anything great, is poetry.
So. You’re in Tokyo. I am here. And that means nothing. We’re just one thing that is happening across a non-existent distance. That’s all.
The sky goes dark. I drive.