Bound States
Tara watches the steam rise from her coffee in precise helical patterns, the way heat always dissipates in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. She thinks about entropy, how all systems tend toward disorder, how even the careful structures built of love and shared mornings begin to dissolve. James is saying something about needing to talk, his voice carrying that familiar frequency she has learned to recognize, the one that signals emotional turbulence barely concealed by forced calm. The afternoon light through the kitchen window catches the dancing dust between them, suspended in Brownian motion, random and purposeless like the words forming between his pauses.
He says he’s been thinking, and she already feels the framework of their life together starting to fracture. She notices the micro-expressions she once memorized: the subtle twitch in his left eye, the unconscious movements of his hands that betray the effort behind his measured tone. She wants to tell him about quantum entanglement, how two particles remain connected across any distance once they’ve interacted, how they affect each other in ways that defy logic and laws. Maybe if she could explain this, he would understand what it means to try to untangle two lives so deeply intertwined. Instead, she says she knows, because she does. She has known in the quiet, cellular way that bodies know when to change, to divide, to surrender.
The silence between them grows like a living thing, filling the space with its presence. She observes how their breathing no longer syncs, how the rhythm of shared sleep and shared life has fractured into jagged, mismatched patterns. He is explaining about growing apart, about wanting different things, about how love sometimes isn’t enough. The words feel both too simple and too heavy, like trying to map a fractal with straight lines, and she begins to catalog the physicality of pain. Elevated heart rate. Constricted throat. Cortisol and adrenaline spilling into her bloodstream as if preparing her for a battle that isn’t there.
She thinks about binding energy, about how even the strongest atomic bonds can be broken with sufficient force, about how matter cannot be destroyed but only transformed. She wonders what they will become, these two people who have shared a bed and a bathroom, the easy intimacy of familiar routines. She says maybe he’s right, because the scientific method demands she follow the evidence, even when it leads to failure, even when it breaks apart hypotheses that once felt unshakable.
The space between them stretches, expands, an invisible force pulling them apart like galaxies adrift in an accelerating universe. She watches him collect his keys and wallet, small acts of departure rendered monumental in their finality. She thinks about conservation, how nothing is truly lost but only changes form, but the thought feels hollow. When he pauses at the door, she sees him suspended in a moment of wave-particle duality, leaving and not leaving, until the act of observation collapses the uncertainty into fact. He leaves.
She sits alone in the kitchen—her kitchen now—and watches the steam rise from her coffee in precise helical patterns, dissipating into the air as heat always does. She thinks about entropy, about how all systems tend toward disorder, about the inevitable unraveling of even the most careful designs.