Lilly

It’s amusing that after all of my dissertation-length rants about reconciling the arts and sciences, I find it so difficult to balance other dichotomies: the proven with the chosen, the normal with the paranormal, fact with faith. A physics textbook I flipped through this summer gave me several things to think about. It administered a memory test which I unwittingly—and by pure luck—aced through pattern recognition; it told me that all of the rote memorization I had forced myself through in my high school physics classes was, indeed, for naught; and it stated, quite firmly, that anyone with any kind of spiritual belief would never truly make it as a physicist. I closed the book immediately. I had told myself that I would do self-study this summer, but something kept me from reopening that particular textbook. Because while I am not a religious person myself, I do not take kindly to a point of view that narrow.

Not when my own dreams can be so insignificantly prophetic—

At 3:58 AM I am jolted out of a REM cycle dream involving an artist whose music video I had recently had on repeat. Is he ever going to get the Olympic gold? I wonder nonsensically to myself, still half lost in the dream, rolling over to paw at my nightstand for my phone. I am prodding stubbornly at the keyboard, recording the imagined events, when the device buzzes in my hand at 4:00 AM precisely with a YouTube notification. That same artist dropping a new music video out of the blue.

—or when a necklace gives me all the answers I want, provided they’re yes-or-no—

It’s a simple pendant on a leather band, a stone with a hole in it and painted shabbily with ogham writing, procured from a tiny side-of-the-road stand in the middle of nowhere (i.e. somewhere on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula). I suspend it in air with my elbow propped on a table and mutter the opening requests: “Please show me ‘yes.’ Please show me ‘no.’ Please show me ‘unknown.’ Please show me ‘cannot answer.'” I don’t really have any important questions to ask. Will this girl text me back tonight? Will I find out my grade in calc tomorrow? Will I succeed in all that I attempt in life? (Yes. No. Cannot answer. That last one is interesting.) The girl texts me back. I don’t find out my calculus grade until the next week. I don’t know about the last one yet, either, so I can’t really blame the pendulum. Am I affecting the swing? Maybe. Probably. Is it still right every time? Damn right it is.

—or when sometimes I just seem to know things.

Maybe it’s hereditary, because my father and I have this almost-game: whenever we watch a soccer match together, be it in person or on TV, whenever there’s a penalty kick, we call the outcome. “Going in.” “Keeper saves it.” “Wide to the left.” Sure, we get it wrong here and there, or sometimes we disagree, but more often than not we both get this feeling that’s impossible to describe when a goalkeeper is about to make a save. Just today, I was at a women’s game at the university in town—my last before leaving for college myself—and the referee blew his whistle against one of our players. “It’s a penalty!” exclaimed my friend. “They’re going to equalize!” But I wasn’t so worried. If it weren’t for my dad elsewhere in the stands, I would’ve been the only one present completely unsurprised when our freshman keeper dived to her right to bat the ball away from the net and then stood, lifting her fist in triumph, as a defender cleared it safely away.

I maintain that I am not necessarily a religious person—no one in my immediate family is—but I like to think that I believe in something, even if that something is not yet clearly defined.

This is my last entry before leaving home. Maybe I’ll find answers when I get to where I’m going. Maybe I won’t. Maybe none exist and maybe I don’t mind either way. ♦