Every time I try to make a snowman, it looks like total shit. As in, the individual spheres that make up the body are all out of proportion, I can’t find sticks that are the right length or shape, someone ate the carrot, and so on. It’s not my fault, really — I grew up in Texas, a famously snowman-less place. And the act of building the snowman is arguably the important bit, the bit that actually matters in the end — a technically meaningless yet social and creative challenge that demands nothing more than your attention and your time (and a carrot). Still, I can’t help but confess to disappointment every time I take a step back and look at it. I’m not a sculptor; I never was.
I’m on the way to somewhere warmer, so I leave behind most of my warm clothes and stuff my backpack with clothes fit for a Texas winter — basically, not very different from any other time of year. Maybe the consistency is why I like going home. When I get to the airport, waiting in the TSA line, I zone out until I get to the plane. It’s hard to focus these days. There are too many things to avoid.
It’s simple, in this moment, to make an attempt at regarding the human complexities around me — to imagine the adventure that family over there is about to embark on, to wonder whether the TSA agent beckoning me through the scanner is happy with his life so far (he’s quite old, so I hope he is), to glance at the dozens of water bottles in the trash and wonder, if you could draw a line through each of their paths to get here, how far and complex a web they would sprawl — it’s easy to do, because the ponderings will stop there. Questions are exceedingly easy to ask, that’s why we have so few answers. And besides, human life is already so impenetrable and strange, so why am I expecting to understand it by a single surface-level glance? Another answerless question. My bad.
The gap between the bridge and the plane forces a current of cool, dry air into the entrance, a cold which stings my hands as I use an alcohol wipe to sanitize my handrests and settle into the middle seat. It’s a full plane, but everyone has the space they need. I’m trying to use my phone less, but I can never resist the immediate pull of a buzz in my pocket. Usually I check it with excitement. Today, I hesitate. Maybe, somewhere inside, I know what it says. I turn it over and read the notification. It’s a text message from the most important person in the universe. They say, with empathy and grace, that they don’t want to date anymore.
…
The concept of “cold” holds a special, somewhat counterintuitive role in physics. We like to imagine it as the similar opposite of heat, a form of energy which can nudge matter into different states of being depending on intensity. In actuality, the cold isn’t a form of energy at all; on a molecular level, cold is absence. That is to say: the less that’s happening, the less movement there is in a system, the colder a thing is.
This is easy to forget in a world where it feels like we’ve harnessed temperature. You supply your fridge with energy, it creates the cold — just as a microwave creates heat. But it’s exactly that comparison which highlights the difference. A microwave’s process is relatively straightforward: an electrical current brings charged electrons to the appliance. Imagine a bunch of tension wound up in a really small stream — that’s electricity, and it’s the microwave’s job to release this tension. It produces electromagnetic waves which vibrate the particles inside, transferring the concentrated buzz of electricity into a much wider spread of heat. Microwaves, and all devices which create warmth, simply spread out the energy.
So, a device suited to create cold would have to do the opposite: gather up the energy in a wide space and concentrate it back into electricity. The problem is that this is impossible. Energy by its very nature spreads across space, which means one would have to use more energy to recondense it. So, refrigerators use “heat pumps” — rather than removing the heat, which is impossible, electricity is used to push it away. This creates the illusion that the fridge is making things cold — in reality, the warmth is simply moved out of sight. Heat cannot be destroyed; it has to go somewhere.
It is this principle which leads us to the end of all things.
Because it’s not just a shortcoming of technology which makes the cold so difficult to control — it is a natural law in everything. The Big Bang created the stars, centralized bearers of energy all across the universe which light all worlds. As they distribute themselves out in the form of heat and color, they run out of fuel and die; some quietly collapsing in on themselves, others screaming color onto the nothingness via supernova. After all these celestial matters are done, and the universe is finally empty, there will be nowhere else for the lowly heat to go. The particles, still vibrating with memories of their conception, will be too far out from one another to create anything new.
It is in this void that the binary separating heat and cold suddenly dissolves. Heat is tangible and measurable, the paint which brushes along the canvas of the universe. Cold is the universe, the complete artwork once the paint has dried. Because, although things may be moving now, they will soon be cold. And once they are, once they’ve run out of spark, cold is all they ever will be.
Interestingly, this exact mechanical process applies with almost perfect congruency to the concept of love.
Like all else, you are finite. Only so many atoms make up your form, only so many years make up your lifespan, and, most pertinently to this topic, only so many traits make up your identity. You have taken great care to ensure that these are good traits, traits that form a you capable of holding and beckoning love. Love is, after all, the only positive thing that separates neural activity from every other chemical reaction; you have made a good choice in valuing it.
But you made a miscalculation somewhere along the line. You got it in your head that love was somehow exempt from the rules of reality. That it was a mystical substance, a fourth dimension, a cheat code which escapes all the boring trappings of being a thing in the universe. That you could have as much of it as needed without having to justify its presence. When laid out like that, your error is obvious, isn’t it? Nothing is able to capture infinity, such a thing does not exist. Just as there cannot be endless energy, or heat, or life, there cannot be endless love.
This is of supreme practical importance to you. The human brain cannot conjure adoration out of nothingness. Love has to come from somewhere — luckily, like everyone else, you have made it your life’s mission to harness this force. You formed connections this way and that, changed your being so that the world would be kinder, carefully measured the ingredients that make up you and switched up the recipe when customers got bored. This system of love will decay into stillness if it isn’t constantly flooded with new energy. You will die without it. You were doing a good job.
And then, you found someone that seemed to contain infinite love for you. No longer would you have to scramble around trying to fix yourself into someone lovable, you made the mistake of believing that you, just as you are, might be able to attract all the compassion in the universe. It felt so ethereally freeing, to just be loved, loved without performance or fear of the end. You got complacent. And when this love naturally ran out, you didn’t understand why. The human brain desensitizes to repeated stimuli — for each thing that is good about you, however genuine, the love grows tired over time. Eventually, all that is you becomes stillness. And in a world where the laws of equivalent exchange govern all, stillness is unacceptable. You forgot that. You won’t forget again.
For that stretch of time in which you didn’t question yourself, you were so content that you didn’t want to be anyone else. You were just you. And you are matter in a universe where all things settle into quiet. You see it now, don’t you? You’re cold. Cold is all you will ever be.
Energy is exceedingly easy to spread out into heat, that’s why the world is so frigid.
Uh… Or at least, that’s what I think sometimes, I guess. I don’t want to be misleading — yes, this is a story about a breakup, and a lot of people have those. But mine went really well. We parted on good terms, at the right time, and as far as I can tell neither of us did anything particularly wrong. They’re a good person, and to this day I still count them as a friend. The love just ran out. As all things do.
Though obviously preferable, clean breakups carry all sorts of their own baggage. There’s no one to blame, no crazy stories or acts of justice. It just ran its course, and at the end of it all the only thing I had to deal with was me. I hated that. I wanted the game to be more complicated, to have more variables and enemies, anything to avoid having to look at me. I know now that I was wrong, but I found myself envious of those with the ability to end their relationships with hate or sorrow — because at least then you get to fight for something.
Though my immediate grief ran its course pretty quick, just a few days, the fallout has stuck around. When I look in the eyes of those I love, be they friends, family, or romantic interests, I see fire — the classic poetic passionate kind, sure, but also the kind that requires fuel to continue burning. And I don’t think I have enough. Sometimes I worry that I’ve led people to think there’s more me than there actually is. I can’t keep all this up. I can’t hold your love for as long as I need it.
On the night that I received that text message, I retired to my room the first chance I got. The air conditioning is broken, it runs too cold at night and too hot during the day. I fell into bed, and for the first time in a long while, I cried. I messaged an old friend about it, just to be able to talk to someone. And among the many extremely kind things they said to me as I poured glass shards of my heart into their phone, one sentence stood out.
“I love you.”
It had been a long time since I had heard that and believed it.
As the hours crawled into tomorrow, I had one of those not-quite-asleep-not-quite-awake dreams. I was in a house, one with everything I needed. Of its amenities, a faucet — this is where I got my drinking water. Day in and day out, I would get my sustenance from there, that crystal clear ambrosia which smoothed over all the roughness inside me, kept me alive.
At some point, I noticed that the water had been getting colder. It sent a sharp sting down my sensitive gums, and I felt its chill travelling all throughout my body as my digestive system dispersed it into my tissue — but it was still water. Still the thing I needed to survive. At another point after that, I turned the handle and nothing came out. As I felt the mouth of the faucet, I realized that the water within had frozen over. But at least it’s still there, I thought. I placed my hands around it, exchanging the warmth of my body to melt a few drips to sustain myself with. But as days passed it got colder and colder, less and less usable. I found myself shivering and dehydrated, spending every hour attempting to coax just one more drop to stay alive.
One day I woke up, and the faucet was gone, as though it had been ripped from the wall while I was asleep. In a trance, all dry and light-headed from the struggle of trying to reverse the inevitable, I did something that I hadn’t done in awhile. I turned the handle on the front door and stepped outside. And I realized, dumbly, that it was raining.
I think I might be ready for love again. I don’t know that my scabs are quite dry yet, but… I think if I had to wait until it was all better, I would be too late. I think maybe broken is just who I am — ugly snowmen, dead stars, questions without answers. You’re saying you love that about me. I don’t understand that. But against all odds, I believe you, and it’s not often that I can fully believe someone. I’m really scared, to be honest, but I’d like to go with you. It sounds very nice to be somewhere other than here. My stuff is already packed, we can leave whenever.
Wait… I think I left the stove on. Let me check that it’s off one more time before we go.
