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Transmissions

Today I received a letter from Montreal. Misaddressed. A former resident, no longer here.

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Tonight we took our godchild to see The Nutcracker. December 21: the dark's grand climax. The Rat King arrives. Ever the same. He draws his sword, summons his horde; he's ultimately vanquished, the stage set for the returning light.

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We had a small, quiet supper. Dark when we left. Subzero outside. The hall a spectacle: a pair of grand Christmas trees, the stage lit by dance and artificial light. Stepping outside afterward a shock. Barely 8:30. It felt past midnight.

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Montreal forms a strange and unalterable part of my history. A standing O in an auditorium whose name I've forgotten the culmination of my musical life to that point. I played as part of a youth symphony at a music festival. Our program was good; our final piece, Kalinnikov's Symphony #1, near-perfect. The final note; the audience's leap. A few days before, I sat in a below-ground cafe in Old Montreal, all brown and terracotta, trying to act older than I was. My friend A. talked to me about a girl, the one he couldn't have, the one he would never have, the way she moved through him like a stove-heated knife.

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Prairies, Quebec: my Earth and equant.

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Two months after the O I met a girl from Montreal, but not while I was there. She flew in to see a friend; physically, she was only in my life for a few weeks. I had a huge crush on her. Later she admitted the same, and as these things sometimes go, nothing happened. We talked online for years. Made plans, then broke them. How long did she hold on to me? We fell in love with others. Opportunities unseized. We finally moved on.

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The equant's a hack. Second century, Ptolemy's addition. It tries to fix the problems with an unfixable model. The Earth at one point; the equant, empty, across. But the model's flawed. Even with the equant, things don't proceed as they should.

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For years, astronomers persisted: the Earth was the centre of the universe; the rotations of the planets were spherical; the mathematics of the equant were necessary.

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One thing I've come to realize is you'll never be able to predict just who you'll end up remembering. In retrospect: my first true girlfriend almost forgotten. The ghosting gone; our summer together barely a tremor. In her place: everything from the year before. The electrical current. The girl who wasn't.

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There is an unfairness in this, given the years, and given the happiness of my life. Why am I reaching back? Nothing good will come of this. It's easy to think of what wasn't when any future is necessarily fantasy.

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Still: does she remember me?

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The solution to geocentrism: the abandonment of geocentrism. The equant jettisoned, somewhere beyond Voyager, leading it in its travels past the Oort Cloud.

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