Inspired by Strangeness and Charm by Florence + The Machine, which I think fits these two really well.

"The static of your arms, it is the catalyst
You're a chemical that burns; there is nothing like this-
It's the purest element, but it's so volatile
An equation heaven sent, a drug for angels."


Cindy's heart throbs wildly as she traces the faint print of his yellow atom symbol with her finger. Her sensory memory brings a new dimension of pain to it all.

If she closes her eyes, she can picture herself grabbing a fistful of the soft red cotton of his t-shirt and threatening him. Smoke curling up in tight curls. An acrid smell of sulphur pellets. The shrill alarm. Suddenly there are firefighters. Sirens piercing, pounding into her psyche ceaselessly. She's screaming and crying and coughing and someone's holding her back. The vague likeness of his ash covered countenance almost seeps into her mind, but she fights the image.

Instead, she chooses to reflect on their strange arrangement— a balance somewhere between amicability and antagonism. When it comes to discerning which is the better state of being, it depends on the day. Relentlessly chasing each other, relentlessly chasing each other away. No shortage of friction or fear, but certainly an abundance of cowardice.

He's gone in the snap of a moment. A blink of an eye. And it's not easy. She recalls telling him to get lost, to take his big head and let her be. He'd never taken well to these suggestions, but he'd known she wasn't entirely serious either. For the sake of her own sanity, she hopes he knows this.

There aren't enough tears in this world to satisfy her. She hardly believes her eyes are capable of such oceans of grief. But they are, oh, they are, and she hopes he understands, wherever he is, that he's taking the mickey out of her. She allows herself the briefest moment of frustration. He's got to be aware of her agony, the agony that presses against her lungs like an abscess.

She tries in vain to write about it, like everyone suggests. Her sophomoric attempts at describing the now shriveled cadaver of their relationship results in vastly exaggerated pleonasms. One day, they are volatile asymptotes, inching towards each other slowly but surely, and another day, they are parallel lines— aligned in subtly equidistant paths. Their coordinates don't always match up, and sometimes, it seems like their planar trajectories are simply too complicated to calculate.

But their chemistry predates their mathematical bounds, and so sparks seem to fly in the strangest of ways. His hands are cold against her neck, her lips are frost against his porcelain cheek. They are clandestine in adoration, and open in loathing. Nothing can endear them to each other more than a good fight, a good mockery. That's when the hands start to run wild, the second skins are shed, and atoms collide in ardent patterns of passion and intense mania.

Their arguments always end this way, always culminate in overly keen postulations of affection. Always end in ineffable confessions, forbidden revelations. They are particles, coming together and splitting apart. They are static electricity and torn silk. They singe everything they touch, lay siege to each other, smolder and turn. They are unstable equations, interrupted linear progressions.

But Cindy has given up on writing about all of this. About their affinity for love and hate, their fondness for fragility amidst fervency. She has given up on writing about their contradicting states of existence. She has given up on precision, on accuracy, on method. She has given up on that which has finally and inevitably stolen him away: science.