You told me in middle school that the world is just one huge Venn diagram of infinitely many independent units, crossroads opening at every decision. Today I am trying to figure out where we lie. The intersection of our circles is three hours long and thirteen inches wide, figuring out sine and cosine graphs two days before the final. Deriving identities late into the night.
I still can’t recall what you look like when we’re apart. Six years of studying math together on the green picnic tables and I can only confidently say that you have glasses. I never learned to remember in images, just as you never started to remember in sounds. We had a conversation about those five love languages, as if there were only five ways to love! I am beginning to think that we need eight billion love languages for eight billion unique people. And two of those eight billion belong to us. Here
is what I’ve come up with. Here is where our system of equations lies on the cartesian plane of the universe; these are the intersections of our circles, the cognates of our love languages: the playlist titled “philia” that you listen to when you’re doing math homework (referring to platonic love for the ancient Greeks and pretentious students like us), the fuzzy image of your silhouette in my mind, and the colorful waveform graphs we sketched, oscillating in opposition, stretching to infinity in both directions.
“Philia in the Time of Pre-Calculus” tries to capture a unique friendship, exploring the idea of ‘Broad Strokes’ through the speaker’s memories. The speaker uses sounds and music to perceive the world, so I was extra aware of my use of enjambment and diction while writing to create a strong rhythm for this work.