By Phoebe Sozou
Edited by Amy Li and Alloe Mak
It takes two babies to drive a racecar. All 94 billion light-years’ worth of stars and extant matter blew out from a single point before our sun was even a thought on some great Creator’s overworked mind. We are a blip in the grand scheme of things, our atoms stacked into twisting forms that reach and reach and grasp and miss, and we still fling our arms out into the great beyond, and we still wait for the cosmos to say something back, and it still takes two babies to drive a racecar, though those might not seem like connected thoughts to you now. I’m asking you to bear with me, if I don’t sound crazy yet.
It takes two babies to drive a racecar. Language is an age-old story we’ve all brushed the face of, and none of us have managed to make sense of it. There is an inheritance, I suppose, of love. The oldest love poem on record was written in 2029 BCE, the oldest love letter is five thousand years old, and whatever form “I love you” took to each of them had to undergo millennia of gradual shaping to reach a state they could capture on stone tablets, to reach a state I can describe in a digitally housed document on a Monday morning. If—and I’m asking you to bear with me again—all of time was happening at once, there would be a man crouching by his daughter in a cave right now, his mouth closing around sounds that mean nothing to us but this to him: my heart, your heart. If linguists were to attempt to catalogue every shift that every language has ever undergone, they would be writing until the universe had expanded another 94 billion light-years, until all our disparate modes of speech became one. Still, some things are constant—at least two people in every year of human existence have fumbled confessions like hot stones between soft hands. Still, our ancestors stood on each other’s shoulders to make their mark on the rocky face of time. Still, there is a word in every language ever formed for love.
It takes two babies to drive a racecar. A half-life is the time it takes one substance to reduce to half of its initial quantity—in other words, exponential decay. Xenon-124, which I swear is a real isotope, has the longest recorded half-life at 1.8 times 1022 years. In contrast, Francium-223 has a half-life of about twenty-two minutes. The half-life of a stable isotope is nonexistent, or at least so long it’s considered negligible. Can you imagine a half-life long enough that it still renders 1.8 times 1022 a necessary value to calculate? I’m no scientist, but it sounds to me like forever is achievable.
It takes two babies to drive a racecar, do you see what I’m saying? There is a bench somewhere and we are sitting on it. There is a pool somewhere and we are treading water. There is a branch somewhere and we are two birds, singing. There is a shiny red racecar and neither of us has our licence, but that’s okay because there is no metaphor in which I’ve not fallen into step with you by now. If there are other worlds, there are none where it took us longer than this to stumble into each other’s lives. Maybe I don’t get to say that. To be honest, I don’t really care.
It takes two babies to drive a racecar. Last night, I told you to be patient in your hope for me and you just hoped harder. You said, “Ten percent by winter.” I said, “It’s taken maybe my entire life since gaining real sentience to get to five percent. Baby steps.” You said, “I care too much to stymie progress in favour of baby steps. I say give the baby the keys to an F1 racecar and let him go.” I said, “On one condition.” So we’ve got a racecar and a halfway-decent inside joke, what now? It takes two to dance clumsily past the threshold of your kitchen with dish soap drying under our nails, two to talk through an old James Bond movie, two to spend the last twenty minutes of class gesturing with increasing force about some four-foot men struggling all the way up a mountain.
It takes two babies to drive a racecar (fact). I’m not going anywhere (promise). Alternatively—it takes two babies to drive a racecar (promise). I’m not going anywhere (fact). I’m trying to say what I failed to earlier—my belief in you does not have a half-life, nor is it predicated on an unchanging state of matter. My belief does not depend on anything but the simple truth of your existence at a single point in time, and you’ve already done that, so I guess you’re stuck with me and my five percent (and counting) forever. Buckle your seatbelt, we watched too many safety videos in grade school to disregard that one. I’ll take the pedals, you take the wheel, and we’ll switch at the next intersection. It’s kind of hilarious, actually. Two babies, one racecar. Where to?
These are equivalent statements, I think. I’m laughing while I write this, it’s ridiculous and that’s the point. I love you. There are currently two trillion galaxies in the universe. The oldest written records of Sumerian predate the invention of the clock, the fork, and the chariot. Xenon-124 has a half-life one trillion times longer than the history of that aforementioned universe. Sam carried Frodo up the side of Mt. Doom. Man’s reach will always exceed his grasp. It takes two babies to drive a racecar. Do you understand now?