NEW YORK, NY – You know it when you know it. That simple phrase is the adage of the romantic. You know it when you know it. You look across a room and in that moment your eyes fall on the person that you’ve been looking for all your life. Refracted light carries that image to your retina which is processed in a mere few trillionths of a second but with repercussions that can last a lifetime. The quintessential “blink of an eye”. Your heart beats faster. Your pulse quickens. These are physical responses that confirm what your eyes have already signaled. The ground rushes up to meet you. 9.8m per second squared. Don’t be alarmed…you’re falling in love.

It is overwhelming and disconcerting. Seven days a week, twenty four hours a day. We don’t believe in fractional relationships. You are two whole numbers that when added create a larger sum. You deal in absolutes. It is 100% or nothing at all. You smirk when you hear others remark that they “give 120%” or some other arbitrary number. No such thing…nothing is more than a whole number. They are being obtuse but that’s okay, so you ignore it and roll on in your bliss. Nothing can permeate your circles. You both find solace in your overlapping lines. You are most comfortable living in the “C”. It’s a simple equation after all. 1+1 = 2. It’s a mathematical certainty. If only all of our relationships can be so tidy. But alas we’re not simple mathematics as much as we’d like to be. I exist as a function and so do you. The very nature of you and I is a derivative and we are constantly changing as our inputs change. Over time and over distance we rise and fall as we graph our function. So we begin in the simple but we evolve as the derivative. We are linked and I depend on your function and you depend on mine. The numbers are all around us we only have to take the time to solve the equation.