The Shippers(101)

“Noted,” I’d say.

“How can you be so chill about this?” Ashley would demand.

“There’s no rush to get engaged,” I’d say.

And there really wasn’t.

Because we were already engaged.

It turned out Cooper really hadn’t been kidding about wanting to get married. One of the things he’d been doing on Bishop’s Cay while I was wandering around looking for him was buying us rings. Not fancy rings, of course—tourist rings carved out of conch shells. Twenty-dollar rings. You might barely notice we have them on.

But we do have them on.

The night we got together, we stayed up until sunrise. And sometime around three AM we found ourselves sitting on Cooper’s balcony, watching the moon over the ocean.

“Remember when you wanted to get married earlier?” I said.

“Of course.”

“I might have overreacted a bit on that.”

“Might have?”

“Says the man who once threw up a corn dog when he had to kiss me.”

“I blame the corn dog.”

“But,” I went on, “I actually think it’s a good idea.”

“What is?”

“Getting married.”

“You do?”

I met his eyes. “I do.”

And at that, he was out of his deck chair and down on his knees in front of mine. “If I propose to you right now, will you say yes?”

I took in the sight of him like that, with the moon and the ocean behind him.

“Because if you’re not joking,” Cooper went on, “it’s happening.”

I could tell he was serious, and I could have backed off right then. I could have waved him away and laughed. I knew just from his expression that he was going to do it unless I stopped him.

So I didn’t stop him.

Instead, very deliberately, looking into his eyes, I said, “I’m not joking.”

And so he took the seaglass ring he’d once given me off my hand. And then we put new rings on each other. And then we got engaged—and started dating.



* * *



WHATEVER HAPPENED TO Pork Pie? Was he brought to justice?

Yeah—no.

We reported him … and nothing else ever came of it.

I hate to say it, and I’m sorry if this is news, but we live in a world where villains pull off a lot of villainry.

I wish it were different, but I don’t know how to change it. All I know how to do is hang out with good people—keep on being as non-villainous as I can.

In the end, Pork Pie got to slash Cooper, and Cooper got … a scar.

A scar that he thinks is “cool” and that he loves to show off at the beach, but a scar all the same.

That’s the truth. Pork Pie got away with it.

But Cooper got … me.

A willing, adoring, and wildly enthusiastic me. A me who’s as heart-meltingly dedicated to Cooper’s happiness as he is to mine.

In case you needed proof that it’s better to be the good guy.



* * *



AND SO, IN the end, my problem set of love … got solved.

After I spent endless years working the puzzle, the pieces finally clicked into place.

It took me so long to see the pattern. The irrational series of interactions with Cooper that formed a continuous line: He had always loved me. And I had always loved him back.

Suddenly, now, in the wake of it all, I could see the elegance of it—the artistry under all the human chaos. Love turned out to be math, after all—complex, and hidden, and so hard to unearth, but there. Most of us never get fluent enough in the language of math to see its beauty. Maybe that’s true of love, as well. But the beauty is there, all the same. Quietly there, and undiscovered—until it isn’t.

Seeing all these deep patterns between Cooper and me probably made me a better person. But I know for sure it made me better at math.

After letting myself fall in love with him, for the first time in my life, I understood how love is not just an underlying structure holding our human universe together, but also a glimpse of something divine. Something awe-inspiring and infinite. Not the kind of infinite that’s out there far away, like the stars, but the kind of infinite that’s embedded in us—and between us. A pattern we follow, yes, but a pattern we also create. An emotional structure built out of the mathematical principles of who we are.

I think about how sculptors sometimes describe the chiseling process as discovering the art inside the marble. Or the poet who said, “Our real poems are already in us, and all we can do is dig.” That’s math, too: As much discovery as creation. Learning to see beauty that’s already there.

It’s life, and it’s math, and it’s art, and it’s love—all different and the same, all chaos and patterns, all unknowable but known.

When I was first learning math, I had to visualize its concepts to find answers. But the more fluent I got, the more the answers became things I had to feel.

And isn’t that what all the searching we do is for, in the end?

Not just to see our lives, but to feel them.

It was a conjecture I was happy to spend the rest of my life trying to prove: that the pattern of Cooper and me … would turn out to be infinite.