I wish it could be that SIMPLE.

The human brain weighs as much as six human hearts. But sometimes the heart feels so heavy there might as well be no brain at all. Looking at a picture of her—the person who, for the past five years, I’ve variously known as Pooh Bear, Starmate, My Love, and Freckles—I use my finger to trace the outline of her face. Our past life together flickers in my thoughts. Tears and laughter and pain and joy, I see it all playing out in my brain, I feel it all in my heart. Things are over between us now, our relationship ending right along with our twenties. Good things must come to end, that’s what a refrigerator magnet told me once. Why should my relationship be any exception? It’s all for the better, I tell myself. But I don’t believe it. Instead, I just feel frozen. I stare at her picture, the room motionless, my memories alive. The freeze is interrupted only by my heartbeat. Someone tapping from inside, awakening me, reminding me I’m not dead, pounding out the old Plathian brag: ‘I am, I am, I am.’ The room is still, apparently serene—but here’s my heart pattering away, indifferent to the stillness of its surroundings. 

My mind feels overwhelmed with thoughts of loss. I want to think about something else—anything else. I decide to think about my thoughts. I have thoughts. Here they are, there they go, zipping around inside me. Here, like every other human, I have this three-pound mass of wrinkly, electrified meat trapped inside my skull, and it is busy. Busy sending signals throughout my nervous system—more signals than all the phones in the world combined—busy serving as the organic epicenter of my thoughts and actions, busy making me. My thoughts, the result of innumerable neurons and more synaptic connections than stars in the universe, coming together to create a self, an identity. I want to reach inside and pluck out one of these mysterious thoughts, but they are too elusive. The entire brain—no, the whole damn system— is at work, the brain just a bulbous gob situated at the top of a spinal cord that stretches and connects through all of me. I have a nerve—the vagus nerve—coupled to my hindbrain that snakes its way through my heart, lungs, and gut, never taking a break from its role as bodily regulator. ‘Vagus’ is Latin for 'wanderer’, and it’s largely thanks to this wandering nerve and its detours through my digestive tract that I felt butterflies in my stomach as I fell in love, and that I felt aches in my stomach as I fell out of love. 

And it’s not just the tortuous nerves and blood vessels that are hard at work. Here, like every other human, I have within me an entire ecosystem of living creatures. There are more bacterial cells in my body than human cells, which means I am more alien than me. My gut alone acts as the home for enough bacteria that if each one were a human being they could populate 15,000 planet Earths. Flowering flora alive and wriggling and eating and farting and breathing, none of them able to exist without me, and me unable to exist without them. Most are helpers, some enemies, generations living out their lives within me, subsisting on my existence. I am the God of a microbial cosmos. So much life and motion inside, and so much motion inside of that motion. All of them, all of me, and all that’s around me, everything that makes up this frozen tableau, is at its most basic level utterly dynamic. The subatomic scaffolding of these stolid and solid walls, if we could look close enough, would be jittering and jiggling and racing, particles with all sorts of exotic names—bosons, gluons, charm quarks, and muons—popping in and out of actuality, moving at incredible and erratic speeds, blurry and vibrant and empty, abstract entities not even existing in the way we like things to exist, but as probabilities, as potential thing-like things, ghostly and ever-moving, never stopping, forever in an ethereal dance that is, starting now, called the quantum shuffle.

All this invisible motion around me, I decide I need to move as well. 

I stand. 

Everything still seems so still. 

I take a deep breath. 

My feet are firmly planted, but the ground underneath—not so much. 

Stay single until you meet the girl whose love heals you, changes you and makes you better.

The girl you look at with a confidence you’ve never known before.

The girl you’d proudly introduce your parents to.

Stay single until you meet the girl who makes you act fast because you can’t stand the thought of her being with anyone else.

The type of girl you can’t imagine hurting or disappointing.

Stay single until you meet the type of girl who believes in you and your dreams and is in your corner entirely.

The one who builds you up constantly and pushes you to be more and do more.

The one who is driven and motivates you to do more.

The one who forces you to take chances in your life.

But the greatest of all is taking a chance on her.

Stay single until you meet the girl who scares you a little.

The one who makes you feel ways you haven’t before.

The one you think about at 2 Am as you wonder, “what is happening to me?”

Stay single until you meet the girl whose face you see when you listen to certain songs, that used to not mean much to you.

The one who makes you smile and laugh in ways you forget.

The one who makes you forget about pain from the past.

Stay single until you meet the girl who is genuine and has a heart of gold.

The one who beats to her own drum and is authentic.

The one whose touch heals you.

Whose kiss makes you want more.

Whose presence makes you enjoy every moment.

The one who makes you want to be a better man.

Stay single until you meet the girl you have to try a little harder to impress because everything in the past you’ve done with others won’t work.

The one who makes you want to take it slow in a generation that tells us to rush into the things.

The girl who makes you nervous before a first date.

The one who won’t take you for granted and will always says thank you.

Stay single until you meet the girl who meets you half way.

The one who accepts your shortcomings and flaws.

Stay single until you meet the girl you can look at and see a good mother you can raise a family with.

The one you want to build a life with.

The one who can hold her own and doesn’t need you but chooses you.

Stay single until you meet the girl who would do anything for you.

The one who loves you deeply and isn’t afraid of it.

Stay single until you meet the girl you want to spoil.

The one you want to spend Sunday mornings with.

The one you can look at sleeping and think she’s the most beautiful girl in the world.

Stay single until you find a girl who still gives you butterflies when she walks in a room, as you say to everyone around you, “that’s her.”

The one you look at and think, “finally.”

Until then stay single.

EXPRESSIONIST ILLUSTRATIONS BY LINDSAY RAPP

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