To The Curious Lover
by Yonathon Budi
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
— Albert Einstein
If it was to you,
then I would write the universe.
With you, I let my heart be taken by hours nested together, black screen with white writing. Orders to the mechanical, the impulses that mimic connections to store numbers where we store memories. Lines of code running down my head.
With you, I found myself staring at windows to a world. Holding back water from us, and us from the animals. Displaced souls circling a tank, a fragment of home that they were given. Beauty in the tame severed of the wild.
With you, there were strings in the universe. I felt vibrations in the air, and created my own movements. Oscillations became frequencies, became notes, became melodies. The harmony of an orchestra tugging at the heart, my theory of everything.
All in the space of books and time of days.
All that I’ve met in your company,
When this was all art. When cells were the fairies, and the stars were all the kingdoms of a new land. A voice to the fables that I see us living. From Socrates to Curie, the words I obtained to describe the dreadful, the wonderful, the beautiful, were built into bastions and castles.
and here I stand on the parapet, singing your sounds with a court alongside me, of lecturers and peers. In this world, where they could find the foundations of their own homes, why is it that we decide to share this castle? When I asked the questions I already knew the answers to, and nodded my head to the foreign languages, that is where I found their reason…
Because which of us has explored every facet of what we have built? When I think of you, every action of yours that I did not understand, how could I not assume the infinite in your infinity?
And so here is where I must acknowledge an ending. What part of you will I have not remembered? Which aspect of you will I never get to see?
In my one life, will you and I ever stand and watch the same comet my great grandfather spent a night of his 20s under? The thousand year old promise renewed every 75 odd years– will I ever make my promise to you under that light of volatile ice across the sky?
In my one life, have I spent enough time with you to forget? These opposable thumbs on palms with no calluses, this vertebrae made upright. How long has it been since the soles of my foot touched the pathways of litter without glass or metal? When I return to where I came from, surrounded by vibrant life in vivid green, movement between the canopies, what if all I can find is damp coldness and loneliness under the chirping birds?
In my one life, will I ever fear for you? Lose you in the boundless mind of my own? Until my song becomes that of the caretaker waiting for me at the end of time; until I feel Libet’s touch again from you for the first time for the last time? Before I forget to say goodbye to you in retrogenesis, let me ask, what were we? What was the time that we spent? What words do I have for all the questions I see in your eyes oh dearest stranger?
The unknown holds still. And I fear, for the infinity of you, that you would have to face all of them alone.
Here I stand to tell you how I love. To know. To find every facet of you, every beautiful quirk, every simplest trivia, every jagged edge, and to be with you in all of them. Until every part of you is known. Until there is nothing for you to fear. For in this endeavor of ours, neither of us get to be alone.
Together ever treading, the perseverance and curiosity, for a sojourner’s lullaby to become a hymn for the opportunity to attempt what the spirit wants.
To see all the brightest hues of coral, and listen to all the symphonies of the birds of paradise. I have known what it’s like to be alone from your company. I have known that how my head works is a disorder as much as it is a gift. I have known to be there for my friends who have lost friends who have lost themselves by the ravenous cells I see spreading on radiographs. I have known how it is to feel this bifurcated love towards my species and all the others it hurts.
This is my promise to you,
That as I change, as the constants of the universe fades in my mind, as the telomeres of my nucleus grow shorter with every division,
how you taught me to love, with eternal wonder and endless depths…
From this one beating heart, I will love you the same,
My Most Beautiful Endeavor.