A Bare Reminder
It was fifteen minutes before closing time at Petrosains, and fifteen minutes before we had to leave. A distorted female voice was making an announcement over the speakers, and a nice young lady told us that we should move on to the next exhibition. I nodded, but didn’t seem to hear her entirely.
We wandered over to a booth where a young woman was inviting us over to – she spoke incredibly coherent English, with a natural swag that almost everyone lacks, dragging the syllables at all the right places. She was showing us this momentum-based mechanism, which produces diagrams like the one above. Friction causes if to converge to a single point until its momentum dies out. We laughed and made off-color jokes as my drawing slowly came together. “It represents your character,” ”Well, what does it mean, then?” ”See, it means that I look simple from the outside, but deep down inside, I’m really complex.”
I don’t know, maybe it was the fleeting feeling of impending finality – that it was all going to end. All these few months of joy, acceptance, jubilation – it was all about to end. Then she asked us why we were here, and we nodded in unison and replied, some math camp. She smiled, and somehow, that was the most coherent memory I had at that time. I don’t know why it took me so long to find this drawing again, but it strikes me as a little silly; how we seem to take the longest time to realize that these little things are somehow rather special to us.
