She penned a story.
The heroine, a literary soul, spent her days hiding in the corner of a café, her words flowing onto the pages. The hero, a mathematician, spent his nights buried in the library, his pen scratching paper in a rhythmic dance, seeking answers in the labyrinth of equations.
Their story began in disconnected worlds. In the café, the heroine gazed out the window, watching cars pass by, one after another. Whenever she saw a couple inside, she pondered: if they were destined to meet, would there be subtle hints? Lines of affection on the palm, patterns in the coffee grounds, an involuntary twitch of the eyebrow upon leaving the house… A snow leopard caressing a penguin in the previous night’s dream. Yet, the meanings of these signs remained unclear. Could mathematics sum up these hints, she wondered?
If there were a chance, she would wish to ask a mathematician.
The mathematician, too, looked out his window, watching cars glide by. Whenever he saw a couple, he mused over the probability of two people meeting and falling in love. Many nights, he breathed on the library’s glass, using his fingers to calculate outcomes. But with too many variables and too little data, the problem was not one that he could overcome. Where could one find more data? Coffee grounds, palm lines, eyebrow twitches, and dreams yet to be interpreted. Perhaps clues lay in these signs, but he could decipher nothing of this kind.
If there were a chance, he would wish to ask a writer.
So the story unfolded. As the author, she knew that a mere speck of a coincidence could kindle their love. Like when the mathematician passed by the café just as the writer finished a paragraph, a mere brushing of their gazes could plunge them into love.
But the opportunity never arose.
Perhaps in another parallel universe, they were destined to meet. But in her manuscript, whenever their paths almost crossed, an inexplicable force twisted her pen: they brushed past each other, like two feathers entwining in descent. She had tried to resist their fates. The library was actually opposite the café, she wrote. In one instant, they looked up at the same time, but a bus, stopping between them, obscured their view.
Decades passed – ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. At a ceremony honouring lifetime achievements, a waiter offered champagne to the sixty-seven-year-old mathematician. The sixty-four-year-old writer, just two metres away, shook her head with a smile to someone else: “Sorry, I can’t hold my liquor.” It was their final brush past each other. Until death, the writer never understood the calculation of probabilities, nor did the mathematician comprehend the possibility of interpreting dreams. Their graves lay worlds apart.
This is where the story ends, as “a tale of those destined never to meet”.
“This isn’t a story,” I say as the 2 PM sunlight falls at a sixty-degree angle. I drape my arm around her shoulder on the sofa. The proximity allows me to gauge the delicate thickness of her hair – between three and four micrometres. A faint scent of diluted shampoo wafts through the air.
“What do you mean?” she asks.
“It’s actually two stories,” I say. “One about the writer, the other about the mathematician. How can it be a single story if they never meet?”
“It’s clearly one story.”
“Would Parasite and Toy Story become one movie if played together?”
She pouts, freeing herself from my arms, and flips through her manuscript on the desk. I remain on the sofa, observing the subtle shadow of her nose cast by the sunlight on her face.
“You mean to say, in every story with two characters, they are destined to meet?” she questions.
“Didn’t Tchaikovsky say, ‘If there’s a gun in a novel, it must be fired’?”
“That’s Chekhov,” she says, displeased. “Tchaikovsky was a musician.”
I laugh. “All those ‘ovs’ and ‘skys’ are so confusing.”
She picks up a novel from the desk, perhaps by one of the ‘ovs’ or ‘skys’, pretending to throw it at me. I raise my hand in defence. Now I understand her preference for hardcovers.
And I stick to e-copies: time-saving, convenient, space-efficient, with no downside, except they can’t be thrown.
“So, Master Chekhov, how should one write a story of ‘those destined never to meet’?” she quips.
“There’s no such thing as ‘destined never to meet’.”
She squints, waiting for me to continue.
“If they never meet, they wouldn’t even know of each other’s existence. Without knowing the other exists, how can there be ‘destiny’? Can you name someone you’ve never met?”
After a moment of thought, she points at me. “You!” she declares.
I spread my hands. “People often say that writers write to fulfil their own desires… Even if it’s an illusion, even if the people ‘destined never to meet’ don’t logically exist.”
She blinks, then suddenly looks up, as if struck by a thought, and puts down her manuscript to rejoin me. Her expression is one of triumphant glee. “I’ve thought of how to revise it.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Start the story with ‘She wrote a story’, and end it with your rambling. Wouldn’t that work?”
“It would, but then it wouldn’t be a story of ‘destined never to meet’. So what exactly does this story want to say?”
“Even if they don’t meet at this moment, if they are destined for each other, they will eventually cross paths one day. How about that?”