Title: Of Love and Mathematics

A/N: too much sadness and talk of numbers vs emotion at the dinner table produces this.

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I interrupt his chatter because I can’t stand it anymore. “What is it with you and numbers?” I ask.

“Numbers are easy to work with. I understand numbers,” he says. He shrugs.

“And you’re relegating human emotions down to pure, static numbers.”

He sighs. We’ve had this argument before.

“Maria,”—I shiver as he says my name— “it helps me explain things.”

“Like love and hate and lust and depression? You can explain those with numbers, statistics?”

“Yes.”

I groan in annoyance. “How?”

“Let me get back to what I was talking about and you’ll see,” he says, calmly, all teacher-like. I suddenly hate his arrogant face.

“If you can explain out how a person who loves someone passionately can hurt them, then I’ll bow down to you, Oh Great One,” I say, sarcastically.

“About—oh, let’s see—96.5 percent of people do things they don’t mean to upon occasion.” He stops there and looks at me expectantly, waiting.

“That’s it? That’s your answer?”

“Yes.”

I snort. “Ha. Very good, I’m impressed.”

He sighs again. I wonder if I’m annoying him. I decide I don’t care.

“When one person loves another person, it isn’t rational. It’s never rational. And when people get irrational, they make mistakes. Sometimes, those mistakes include hurting the one person that made them that way. It’s all very simple, really.”

“So, love is simple, is it?” I ask, grinning.

He nods. “Yes. It’s irrational.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “Love is simple and irrational. And that’s your belief in life, I suppose?”

“More or less, yeah.”

“I’d like to see you when you fall in love. See if you don’t feel the same way,” I murmur as we all pick up our books to get to class.

I hear him mutter, “I already have,” and I stop in my tracks. And get run into by a pothead, but that doesn’t faze me. I hear him before I actually feel his hand on my shoulder. I spin around as he touches me and end up face to face with him as everyone files past us.

“Love is irrational,” he says, eyes shifting between my eyes and my lips. I grin and he breaks into a smile.

Love is irrational, he says. Maybe he’s right.