My lover went out to solve a space-time paradox and never came home. It was pretty common in those days. Entropy had descended. Wormholes opened up in grocery stores. People sprinkled strange matter on their cereal. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. A space-time paradox gets under your shoe like a banana peel. You’re thinking about it all wrong, she’d say to me—we’ve been inside the banana peel this whole time. She was always sitting like a bird, writing equations on her palm. I kept telling myself it wouldn’t happen to us. In grad school, we got through Advanced Quantum Mechanics without a scratch. And I always looked where I was walking. Didn’t text and walk. Didn’t blink and walk. It was anarchy in those days. Atomic structures had rearranged themselves. Electrons were on strike. The math would smear whenever I held her hand. Glitter ink everywhere. You wouldn’t believe the fights we had. People were jumping into the cosmic microwave. Has anything—really—ever made sense to you? The first morning I woke up alone, I poured my coffee down the drain, and it didn’t collapse into a singularity as I had hoped it would. The PTA yoga moms who jog past my apartment talk about black holes. They say that crossing an event horizon really shifts your perspective. My lover swears on it. It’s like there was only one place you were ever going. Only one face you have ever seen. When we first kissed, I thought I might be crossing it, but I didn’t fall into her so much as disappear.