Things my Scientist Boyfriend Taught me by Mileva Anastasiadou
Editorial Intern Maddy Weist on today’s short: “Things my Scientist Boyfriend Taught me” explores the emptiness we feel as we walk through this life. It's rare to be able to name this feeling, being touched by the intimate, magical things in a painful way. Love touches us all differently. Mileva Anastasiadou puts words to this experience as she pokes and prods around the dark matter of this relationship with grace. We loved this piece and found ourselves “swallowed by the unknown” and we hope you do too!
Things my Scientist Boyfriend Taught me
When I ask my scientist boyfriend to talk dirty to me, he talks in science. Since electrons repel, we never really touch, he says, while holding my hand. I stop him. I don’t want to hear about that, I want to know more about magnetic fields and how we come together and stay together, but he looks at me like I’m stupid. He claims there’s gravitational forces and stuff, but the laws of attraction are shit people made up to feel better, and I say, duh, now make me feel better, and he frowns like he can’t. He insists we don’t attract what we want, that we can’t even touch for fuck’s sake, but he’s lying, because we touch each other, and we get injured and damaged and hurt.
The largest part of the universe is made up of something we don’t know much about, he says, looking at me perplexed, like he doesn’t know me. Hey, it’s me, I tell him, but he looks away, like I’m dark matter, unknown, dangerous, a black hole that will swallow him and eat him alive. I’m not in the mood for more, so I rise to fetch us a snack. He’s not in the mood either, not even for snacks, or life. He says his house was auctioned off this morning. Oh, I say, because I can’t find more suitable words. I haven’t known him long enough but I say he can crash at my place if he likes. He smiles, relieved. There is a whole fucking universe, he says, with his right hand pointing at the sky, and I don’t belong anywhere. He’s homeless, he tells me, a tree uprooted, an untethered orbit.
An atom is nearly all empty space, he says, but this isn’t foreplay. That’s what explains the hole inside. It’s not pain, I’m not faulted or damaged. It’s just natural to feel empty, I conclude, but I don’t tell him. He says he’ll repay me. I ask for what. He shrugs, like I should know he owes me, and I feel emptier, because all we have isn’t life like I thought. It’s not love, but a transaction, like the one he had with the bank. We hold each other tight, but we don’t make love and we don’t talk either, and I want to say it again, hey, it’s me, but we float in dark matter now. We both have been swallowed by the unknown. I have learned enough for today, only this is the type of knowledge I’d rather not know, the science of emptiness, of love bargained, of wonder lost. He curses the universe and its laws before he turns off the light, and in all truth, I find it unfair because we can’t blame the universe for what we made of it. I still see the magic and the beauty, but it doesn’t count, because I still have a home and roots and a fixed orbit.
Mileva Anastasiadou is a neurologist, from Athens, Greece and the author of Christmas People and We Fade With Time by Alien Buddha Press. A Pushcart, Best of the Net, Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions nominated writer, her work has been selected for the Best Microfiction anthology 2024 and Wigleaf Top 50 and can be found in many journals. Follow Mileva on Twitter @happymil_ and on Instagram @happilander.
