Man From Wedlock

I already had it planned out in my head when I woke up.

It was sort of a Python-esque song/poem/rhyme about the chances of meeting anyone, in the context of the age of the Universe. I wrote down some key words to help me remember:

·         Infinitesimal

·         Incredible

·         Supernova-born

·         You and me

·         9 dimensions

·         Extraordinary

·         Gravitational waves

It was going to list all the coincidences and unbelievable sets of chance that:

a)       The physics of the universe exist in the way they do, so

b)      Elements were fused and exploded and planets and stars and gravity and all that sort of did whatever, and

c)       Earth was born

d)      Eventually life appeared

e)      Loads later humans came along

f)        All our ancestors passed on their DNA in a very specific and aleatory way, so

g)       Eventually I was born and you were born, separately, and knowing nothing of each other, until

h)      We led our lives making choices that we didn’t know were choices that would lead us to meet, because any single different thing may have meant we wouldn’t get on the same train, or the same carriage, or the same set of seats, but we did and we talked and then parted, but

i)        I went back to get your number, because I felt brave and I never felt brave, and

j)        We went out, and

k)       Eventually got married and all that.

It was going to be a sort of faux-epic, which started with the size of the universe and – a bit like one of those graphics on Google Earth – zoomed right in, right in from the Oort cloud through the outer planets toward Mars past Mars toward Earth through the lovely swirling cloud cover through the skies right down right down to Merseyside to a moving train that we both got on randomly and the camera, the poem, would centre on us just laughing, me with my big book of Ideas and you with paint under your fingernails and brown fingers from doing make-up in a school play, and it was going to be a cinematic type of poem but one that knew it was a bit silly and one that was celebrating the chance, I spose, of love and all that, in an infinite and ineffable universe, a universe that even the cleverest bastards have no idea what constitutes 95% of it.

I was going to end this poem by re-listing all the coincidences and stellar explosions and decisions to take the slightly later train than I planned and all of that. It was going to point to how incredibly unlikely all this was that brought us together in the same lifetime, let alone the same city, the same train, the same language and the same joke, and it was going to end with the last line:

 All this considered, me not taking the bins out yet really isn’t worth having a row about.

Which would have been sort of a mini-ha-ha sort of quite cute and a bit silly but maybe adorable and cheeky comment on life and all that.

Instead of all this, which I’d had planned so well in my brain’s hypnagogic state, I had to do prosaic, boring, mundane, annoying paperworky stuff. So I forgot the rhythms and the rhymes and the structure and even the tune I’d been singing it to when I was half-asleep. Trying to log in to websites, with credentials you know are absolutely spot on, but consistently being told the details are wrong, is a great way to kill poems or little stories or whatever snippets of creativity can be wrestled screaming from unwilling muses.

But maybe, maybe this was how it was meant to be too, and maybe this is a better way, or the real way, that these ideas and memories needed to be written down.

Because it all, actually, really, truly, did happen. 

Because stardust is magic.