Schrödinger's Equation

We met.

There was a story.

One story.

You brought half.

I brought the rest.

The halves kept changing.

The total never did.

Then we parted.

After that,

people began counting.

Not the days.

Not the distance.

But, the stories.

Everyone wanted to know

how many there really were.

I searched for an honest number.

But how do you assign a constant to a variable?

The answer changed every time someone asked.

With you, there were two.

With me, there were two.

Curiously, they weren't the same two.

Memory is a peculiar mathematician.

It never solves. It edits.

Every witness adds another author.

Every retelling subtracts another silence.

Every certainty divides another truth.

Eventually, the arithmetic stopped recognising itself.

One refused to remain one.

Two couldn't agree on who counted first.

Three arrived without ever being introduced.

By then, the numbers weren't describing the story anymore.

They were describing the people trying to survive it.

Years later, people still ask

which version is true.

I tell them I don't know.

Not because the truth was hidden.

Because the moment someone found it,

they became part of the story they were trying to measure.

The first person who counted us changed the number.

The first person who judged us changed the ending.

The first person who listened became someone who had been there.

Maybe there were never two stories.

Maybe there was only one,

being torn apart by everyone

who needed a different version to survive.

And maybe, somewhere,

there is a seventeenth person telling this story

because sixteen before them couldn't agree

which two people they were talking about.

Two people in versions nobody remembers,

still arguing over which one of them was the original.

Funny thing about mathematics:

the answer is always different

once the equation realises

it was never seeking a solution;

it was only trying to prove

that everyone who touched it

was already part of the problem.