Nora Hikari
On the Physics of Girlhood
A perfectly spherical girl approaches a long-remembered friend and creates a force of love equal to the mass of their own bodies times the speed at which they ran from their mirrors. A perfectly reflective girl stands at an angle counter to her sudden realization in the open air of her lover’s back. I am afraid of facing you. I am afraid of bearing the full brunt of the release of girl particles from your excited body and seeing what comes out of my own. Hybridized girl orbitals amass around my heart and configure me into a kind of probabilistic lie. Given my current velocity there is a certain likelihood along a certain geometry that what I am in this moment is something I cannot acknowledge. I think maybe girl is inevitable. If a sufficient force of repression is applied to separate a girl from her body, another girl and another body will manifest in the empty space. On a reflective plane the girl facing me speaks: not-girl is a kind of metastable. In a false vacuum you can live your whole life and never even have to look at yourself. This false vacuum survives as long as it possibly can, building suns and cities and narrow alleyways into which it hides all of its inevitable catastrophes. Mercifully, girl happens in a specific point in space. Girl spreads out in the buried universe as a perfect sphere, annihilating the forces that claim to hold life together. One day you will be faced with absolute reality and I promise that I will still love you.