When One Nerd Loves Another

When One Scientist Loves Another...

When I tell you I love you, I’ll say
our functions are asymptotic,
and we approach the same vertical limit from opposite sides.

You will understand the gravity of that statement, because you know how lonely it would be, to be linear,

traveling straight across pages and pages of graph paper,
smashing indelibly through each of those delicate tiny little squares, further and further into bright bright blank bleached
100% recycled fibers
forever.

And you know the disappointment,
the inevitable ache of divergence after
intersection at a point -
because you know that points are infinitely small, and the closer you look, the smaller they shrink away.

You know what I mean:
that you and I, we will always be our own separate lines, you = you and I = I,
but our lines will continuously converge,
until our mechanical pencils and our ball point pens

tell each other that we must be one.

And you understand the nature of infinity,
the googles and googles of 0s that trail behind, the unthinkable immensity of what lies ahead

So you understand what I mean:
I want to grow so close I know each of your cells,
by name and by type;
I greet each of them in the halls of your limbs,
and I’ll always take the time to check their answers if they ask.

I think our limit should be pi.
Because I love each one of your curves - their circumference, diameter, arc length, and pi hides within each one.

And yes, it’s irrational, but it’s also real; and You told me yourself - you can’t logic love, but

We have infinity to calculate its every decimal place. I want to divine each one of them with you.

When you say,
you make me feel like 1/0,

I’ll know that you mean I make you feel undefined - That sometimes you feel like you’re going to explode - break the system,
make high-schoolers cry,
send Euler and Newton into hysterics -

But I also know that sometimes,
undefined is a good thing,
terrifying but exciting, and
if you existed perpetually as something boring like 7, life wouldn’t be worth living.

And I know the concept’s beauty: that the simple combination of
1 (solid, lonely) and
0 (nothing but naught)

suddenly spikes further than any graph paper could ever go

And I’ll say, baby, I’ll be under you any time you want and whenever it’s too much,
I’ll just suck in a little and become an 8,
and we can rest as 0.125 for a while.

(Oh, and by the way -
I switched out your whiteboard marker for a Sharpie while you weren’t looking So even if you try, you’ll never be able to erase me away -

Or at least, not before having to go hunt through the building for the Windex and I know when you come back in the room, you’ll look up at the sheer genius of all we’ve written and yell, Eureka! That’s it! And run through the halls yelling about the beauty and the simplicity of our equations.)

I know that not all our problems are easily solved -
this is new material for us and the professor didn’t come in today, and sometimes I’m semi-continuous at best,
but just give me a minute to do a quick you-substitution
and transform our equations into polar coordinates, or spherical,

because sometimes,
that’s all it takes
to simplify the answer easier than pi
And besides, Cartesian coordinates are so - straight, boring like 2nd degree polynomials
and as we approach each other,
I seem to be developing a penchant for complexity.

What I’m trying to express is that I don’t care what subject we’re in, as long as it’s math
and as long as it’s you,
I’ll do textbooks full of practice problems

just to get you just right.