Math.

I learned today that my half-sister, who I barely know, fell off of a roof and broke two ribs. Our mutual father shared this with me, telling me that the email he learned this from sounded remarkably upbeat. He tells me this as I drive home, my drive to work occupied by the thought of 9.8 meters per second squared.

See, since I arrived in Berkeley I have felt like I was falling. Math has always given me comfort and I have been trying to work this angle into some schizophrenic piece I've been composing about terroir. Chemistry, though it is what I should be focusing on, does not have an explanation for this unless we dive into my brain and any potential imbalances that may have arisen. I feel comfort in this freefall. Perhaps the sister I barely know shares this physical trait.

Most people I know tell me that the pre-sleep dreams of falling that wake them upright are disturbing. Yes, they disturb me too, but apparently I like being disturbed. I would love to fall, free, over a perfect plain, forever. I spent that much time with math in my head. I see tron as a corrupted grid. Let me swim with no terminal point.

So is the love of a speculative physics biological? I don't know this woman and she is my sister. I can imagine her getting to the point where she climbs on a roof to do some work. I can feel her embracing a life in the country with animals (dad was vague about what sort of animals, though I tend to assume domesticated) and a ladder, or a chimney or some stairs she built out of milk bottles. The roof she stands on looks out over something so beautiful or horrible that only she could describe it with a whisper and only those who haven't seen it would give it a shout. She definitely has a hammer that she wails with, Hendrix style, on something. Shingles? Beams? I don't even know if they should be beems or beams in that case, but I am the math part of the kinship.

We learn to fix a car. We ride bikes across traffic in a dangerous place. We find this out of the way place in the middle of everywhere that has something good to eat that no one has noticed. I hate her when she hates me, but we always remember who we are. We buy a band-aid, one of us gets hurt and then realize the change used to buy the band-aid belonged to the person who wasn't hurt. Even if we are a country apart we still look for the same things in our pockets. We forget ourselves as we fall.

Me, I don't have two broken ribs, but I wonder what that would feel like right now. I wonder if it would feel like this.