Math was always a problem. Fear of things, of tools meant to help.  Fear of the protractor, the calculator, the quadratic equation.  Fear of the x and of the y.  The points on a graph seemed random, even if they were actually mapping times, speeds, distances.  I suppose what I really wanted was something to make me whole, to root me; not to halve me, to square root me, to spin my brain.

They said the world was made up of numbers, if you looked at it the right way; but I’ll tell you this: when I stood at the crest of the tallest hill in the canyon and looked towards the horizon, there was no way it was made of numbers, no way it was made of anything but plain earth.  Height gave me false perspective; I thought I could see the curve of the earth.  The oil rigs like stationary pirate ships, the blue outline of an island against a blue sea and a blue sky.  The grass beneath my feet; yellowing perhaps, if the season was nearing summer, starting to turn to gold dust.  Did equations dictate that shift in colour?

(I read, today, that while taking his first hot-air balloon ride, the mathematician Carl Gauss realized that all parallel lines meet and that space is curved. Gauss: known as the Princeps mathematicorum, the prince of mathematics. Presiding from a hot-air balloon, loving what he called the queen of the sciences.  Space is curved.)

The space in my room curved at night when I didn’t want it to.  My father told me that when he was a little boy, lying in the dark, the corners of his bedroom used to recede before his eyes. What did you do?  I asked him.  It went away, he said.  I listened to the radio and it went away.  I thought I could feel space swallowing me.  Is it the same? I asked.  I don’t know, he said.  So for years I lay half-asleep hoping the space wouldn’t swallow me, some nights, like the ones spent splayed beneath the milky way, tracing the trail of the stars across the sky, easier than others.  This is how math makes me feel.

It was really the hunger for human contact, but I didn’t know it yet.  Do you know how it is to go to sleep with wildfires raging?  Ash in your eyes, the sky heavy with fine debris, and you think, what if they creep too close, who will know, who will help me?  And you realize you will just have to be ready to drive away as fast as you can, and the next day, under the red sky, you drive to town and while you are there the fires do creep too close and they won’t let you back home.  Yes, that was the night, the night I called a friend and said I’m coming over, even though the highways were closed and it would take me over an hour to crawl through late night traffic.  The night I tried to take a shortcut and found myself climbing a hill in my little car, the atmosphere so clouded by fog and ash that I could scarcely see a foot in front of myself.  To one side was a drop.  The gas meter flickering low, my phone long out of range.  The road too narrow to turn around.  Hungry for human contact I had literally driven myself into the heart of nowhere.  I was not so much panicked, though I might have been, as fascinated, horrified.  How I could through I don’t know.  When I saw the lights of other cars skimming the midnight air I cried.  Then, later, at the gas station finally, in an Edward Hopper painting, a woman in heels came out of a red sportscar, asked me questions about the town, the road closures.  Human contact.

But space is curved and then there you are back again, in that horrible isolation, that wonderful isolation.  What good is math when your day looks like this: you wake, you walk, you eat, you walk again, you eat again, you read until the darkness closes in on you and to leave the house is suddenly an exercise in courage.  All the night sounds, the coyotes close, the owls, once the squeals of a wildcat.  Cattle braying on hillsides.  The opposite of city sounds.  I thought the fear that ate me was self-induced, but then, anyone who has had to speak to their dog just to remember the sound of their own voice can be forgiven a certain hunger, a certain uneasiness.

How do you hate something and love it so much all at the same time?  How do you yearn for it, dream of it, and yet know, when, this week, an inkling of that old fear, that old craziness, spills into your heart, that it’s isolation that’s made you (at elast in part) what you are?  Is there an equation for this, a graph, a theorem?

All parallel lines meet.

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On days like these, I’m reminded of the ranch. We have a dead something festering in the walls or under the floorboards somewhere; all we know is that the smell is strongest at the spot just before you enter the kitchen. The Man comes home from football wanting to take a shower; but a pipe has burst, or broken, or done whatever it is pipes do, so that the kitchen is flooded with a sudden stream of water before we turn the main off. By sticking our heads in the cupboard under the sink (him in football kit, me in an oversized and ripped man’s shirt and a pair of silk pajama shorts because I thought, silly me, I might have an early night) we ascertain which particular bit of pipe is the problem (“You see the silvery one?” he says. “No, not that silvery one, that silvery one.”). But what good is knowing this? I have the imprint of a wet review section of the Guardian from six months ago on my feet and the Man can feel some “fraying,” but neither of us is taking a bath tonight, I can guarantee that. As we carpet the kitchen in newspaper we talk about the smell, which the Man is convinced is like galvanized rubber. “It’s dead rodent,” I assure him. “I got very used to that smell in my childhood.” Which makes my childhood sound horrific; it wasn’t, quite the opposite, just infused, every so often, with eau de decomposing rat. Or eau de galvanized rubber, if you prefer.

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Just as we finish scrambling along the wet shores of a makeshift lake, my phone rings. We’re behind a perfectly English stone wall, sheltered from the muddy road running away from the village. Just a 9-year-old boy and myself. We’ve been exploring the outskirts of the village, the secret swampy places between water and meadow, for nearly an hour. At one point, after I sink in the mud, I tell my companion about the time my Dad and I donned wellies and walked the length of our local creek, following it until it met the sea. Now he’s calling me, my Dad. From Buellton, the truck-stop town of grocery stores and auto-repair shops. I can’t see civilization from here (maybe the gleam of a thatched roof beyond the wall) but I can talk to California. I’m watching the 9-year-old leaping over a stream in the same way I used to do while I waited for my Dad to finish his work in the garage. I’m speaking to that same Dad while I watch the 9-year-old. There’s something strangely circular about this, and something dizzyingly meta. And, more simply, something rather delightful.

(Also, re: the last post, this, from Alain de Botton: “Journeys are the midwives of thought.”)

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We sit in Christ Church meadows by the daffodils, watching a stream of toddlers drawn as if by magnetism to the mound of dirt beside the pathway. One rolls repeatedly down the mound until his father tells him they’re moving on.
“I don’t want to go,” says the boy.
“Well, we’re going, anyhow,” says the father, and scoops up his other son, dissapears behind some trees. Dirtboy takes one last lackluster plunge through the mess, then sprints after his family.

After sandwiches which are too big for our mouths, we share a banana. I practise pouting my lips, the Facebook face, the look that other girls take on when posing for profile photos. I can’t plump them up enough without looking demented, descending into giggles. I give up and we watch more children, attracted by the mound of dirt. We watch the toddlers who have just learnt to walk careening down the path, thrilled by their own movements, unsteady but unwavering in gusto and intent. The Man says maybe I’m a little like that, too.
“I get the impression,” he says, “that at the age of about four, you decided you’d mastered all the basics, and from then on out you were just going to read.”

It’s more or less true, I say back. (Later, walking down the flat surface of the High street, I trip spontaneously. More true than less true, I think).

At the kissing gate by Merton college he traps me, kisses me sweetly.
“Is that because no one can see us?” I say.
“It’s because it’s a kissing gate, you moron,” he says. Kisses me again.

After we circle the city with our footsteps we come to settle at a bar on the High street where we sit close to the window, watching pink blossoms shuddering in wind. He reads the paper while I attack Essays in Love. There’s the strange sadness of a Sunday as the afternoon wilts into evening, as we move away from weekend papers, ipmromptu picnics in the garden, towards alarm clocks, early morning stresses, hours spent at work.

I look up every so often to make a different point about de Botton’s book. At the reference to Aristophanes, I balk.
“I find the idea that we’re all looking for someone who was once a part of ourselves really lonely,” I say. “Like, I want the person I love to be different. I want company.”
“I’m not sure that’s what that means,” he says. Whether he’s right or not I don’t know, but it highlights how differently we can read things. “It’s just about completion.”

A huge clock hangs from the cieling of the bar. It makes me feel both unwelcome and excessively desirous of staying all at the same time. The same way that being in a train station makes me feel. I know I’m in transition, but I could stay for hours, I think, watching everyone else, going somewhere else. Rhythms marked by a minute hand (is it coincidence, then, that the Man tells me this bar used to be a music store?).

Later, I finish Essays in Love in bed. I have read the entire book in a day and feel heavy with de Botton’s relationship woes. Sleep comes easy, and when it comes, it is quiet.

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This morning, after we awoke to the sounds of an electric guitar and feeling of two terriers bouncing on our bed, after we packed the kids off to school (no, not our kids and no, not our terriers), after we cleaned up the puppy poo from the floor and loaded the dishwasher (alas, also not our dishwasher–a dishwasher being in my mind the height of domestic luxury) and bought cinammon rolls from the shop next door, we indulged, whilst waiting for a taxi to take us back to our real life in Oxford, in some television.

Some people, channeling fond memories of childhood, might opt for cartoons or sitcoms, but as the Man and I were not television children, and neither are we in the least bit ordinary, our greatest TV pleasure is anything that has to do with houses. Programs about selling houses, buying them, rennovating them, decorating them, living in them: it doesn’t matter. We both seem to have this sickening need to scoff at how badly other people have designed their bathrooms, and/or drool over their opportunities for buying (and therefore fixing up) property.

This morning it was a program called “Wanted Down Under“. A family was trying to decide whether or not they wanted to stay in Britain or make the move to Australia, and we followed them on a house-hunting expedition, slightly sullen teenage son in tow. Then it was “Axe the Agent”, which, sadly, we only got middway through before our cab arrived. The family with the seven-bedroom house had just finished cleaning it up, but I still wouldn’t buy it (too reminiscant of the sprawling ultra-new California mansions I loathed as a youth).

I don’t know quite what it says about us that the sort of television we most enjoy watching is on at 10 am on a weekday morning.

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