black hole dreams of being physicist

a theory I have about truth and time and God and 4-dimensional planes

in quest of truth - sir francis bernard dicksee

My psychiatrist has been misspelling my ex’s name for two years. I only find out when my psychiatrist is no longer my psychiatrist and his two years’ worth of notes on me gets mailed in a crisp, manila envelope. When my friend sees the packet, she jokes I’m single-handedly responsible for deforestation. I’m not quite sure what to make of the misspelling at first; there’s a whole forest’s worth of papers on my desk and in it is a story of a person that doesn’t exist.

In a class, we are asked to rank five subjects from most truthful to least. Math, science, history, English, art. I am thinking of my grandfather calling math a distilled science. I am thinking of how this ranking means truth is a scale. If truth is a scale, I wonder which point lies closer to zero: me writing about my ex using the right name and wrong story or my psychiatrist writing about my ex using the wrong name and right story. I am thinking of Copernicus — I think about Copernicus more often than I’d like to admit — I am thinking of how he stood so close to the truth it made him look like a liar.

There is a truth I am trying to hold in my hand. There is a truth I am trying to hold in my hand except the truth is a function of time and so the truth I am holding is the sand of an hourglass. There is an hourglass I am holding in my hand and I cannot hold the truth until the glass shatters. The glass shatters and I cut my hand and drop the sand. I am reading a timestamped note written by my psychiatrist and I don’t know if the words are still true, even if they were at some point.

I say point and I am thinking of a graph. I say graph and I am thinking of a plane, I am thinking of axes, I am thinking x, y, z. Truth, time, God. At some point after they began slicing atoms, scientists stopped using the word “smallest” so definitively. I’m starting to think truth is more an approximation than anything else; I ask my father, the physicist, what happened before the Big Bang and he says “maybe God.” I am starting to think truth is more an approximation and God fills in the rest.

The file is still sitting on my desk and I haven’t read past the first misspelling of his name. I am scared to read about myself because I know it is the truth. Sorry, that was misspelled. I am scared to read about myself because I know it is a truth. Around the time of the third misspelling of his name, I thought he was the only person who truly knew me. You know too much about me, I wrote over and over again in our texts. If truth was an approximation, then that made him God.

But time is the third axis and we haven’t spoken in a year. My psychiatrist’s misspelling has becoming a closer approximation of truth than his correctly spelled name in my contacts. There is a new love that all my friends want to hear about and beyond the typical things that made me fall for him, I think of how he disagreed when I said I’d be a bad mother. It has become an inside joke that I am too chaotic to raise a child normally and I don’t mind the assumption. But when he says I am kind enough to be loved, I think I understand why physicists are so desperate to be the first to discover something new. I write: I think you know me in a way I want to be known. Maybe I have a type.

I tell him about my theory on truth being an approximation and he responds “then let me be God.” My father became a physicist because he was desperate to claw himself closer to truth than anyone else; I am starting to think I inherited more from my father than just his face. I am careful not to say things so definitively anymore, but when he says “let me be God”, it might be the closest I’ve gotten to a love that’s spelled correctly.

There is a truth in the file that remains timestamped and there is a truth that marches on outside. I am thinking the plane of truth, time, God might be too large for the human mind to comprehend, but I am chasing this line until it becomes asymptotic. I am chasing this line until truth and God become equivalent; I am chasing this line until I see God. I think it may be a curse: the closer I get to God, the less there is of him. The closer I get to truth, the less there is of God.

The only axis left is time. I look at the file on my desk: it is complete. I think of where history stood in the list, perfectly center. There is a truth in the file that has stopped moving. Outside, time marches on.

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