I blame Kyllorac for this.
we were looking at the numbers, the dance of
ones and twos, threes and fours, and their escorts:
the s-p-d-f that made us turn our heads sideways
and squint at the pages, at the charts and tables
that sprawled above the walls of text we could
not bring ourselves to read, as above us the
teacher spoke on, words like probability and orbitals
or energy levels catching at our minds then slipping
away, carried by the hushed chatter that buzzed in
the spaces between us. 2-s rolled down the page,
both a sphere and a neat little box that could spin and
spin, up and away until it came down, and this we were
told was energy, held like a treasure or a toy in the
gray cloud of possibilities around the certainty of
a nucleus. 2-s rolled down the page and then it was
3-d, blooming starburst and skipping ahead in that
strange illogic of textbooks everywhere. we were told
this was how it worked, because numbers said so, and i did
not understand but did not care because it could be memorized,
which was easier than remembering how those other letters
worked, the ones that pranced l-m-n, more abstract and less
playful, though probably just as important.
i drew a graph and it waved at me, irregular and smooth
as it widened across the paper, and then i drew another,
a different one, that thought itself a disc but was not
sure, which i figured was fair because we didn’t know
either, and could just guess at it, like playing hide and
seek in the dark, except with tiny tiny things that spun
and whirled and gave each other room and roles to play,
and, i liked to think, shivered full of energy and
all the possibilities, all the spaces in the world.
Small edit to fix commas and add hyphens
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