Theory of Love

Chapter 2

The morning sun streamed through the window of my dorm room, casting a soft, golden light on the stack of textbooks piled on my desk. Physics equations, problem sets, and notes filled the room like a quiet, constant hum in my life. My second year as a theoretical physics major was more demanding than the first, and I was starting to understand why everyone said that college would change you.

Most days, my world revolved around constants, variables, and the elegance of equations that described the universe. It wasn't just math—it was the language of reality itself. There was something comforting about that precision, the certainty that if you just worked through the numbers, everything would make sense. No guessing, no ambiguity. Just logic and reason.I pushed my hair back into a ponytail, tying it tighter as I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop. Today's task was a set of differential equations on quantum mechanics, and I had a feeling it was going to take most of the day to get through them. The other girls in my dorm were probably off somewhere getting brunch or catching up on sleep after the party last night. But for me, this was the only place I wanted to be.

Well, almost.

I thought about Jack again, and my fingers hesitated on the keyboard. It wasn't like me to get distracted by someone, especially not someone like him. He was... unpredictable. Chaotic, even. His way of looking at the world was fascinating, sure, but it was so different from the way I saw things. I was all about structure, finding patterns in the chaos. Jack seemed to live *in* the chaos, like he thrived on it.

I shook my head, trying to push the thought of him away. We were nothing alike. And that was fine. I had my world of theoretical models and equations, and he had his sociological observations and theories. Still, something about our conversation last night had stuck with me—his ability to read people, to find patterns in something as random as a college party. It was unsettling, like he had peeled back the surface of things and shown me the gears turning underneath.

But physics wasn't like that. Physics was straightforward, grounded in reality. You could break the universe down into quantifiable parts. Even the mysteries of quantum mechanics followed rules, as bizarre as they were. Jack, though? He seemed to break the rules. Or maybe he was just playing by a different set of them.

I sighed and focused back on my screen. My professor had assigned a particularly tricky problem involving wave functions and probability amplitudes, and I needed to concentrate if I had any hope of finishing before my study group later this afternoon. Numbers, equations, and probabilities—I could lose myself in them. They made sense.

The campus outside my window was waking up slowly. Students wandered across the quad, some still wearing sunglasses and holding cups of coffee, clearly recovering from the night before. A few skateboarded past, headphones on, oblivious to everything except the path in front of them. My university in New York City had a way of feeling like its own little world—self-contained but never completely separate from the pulse of the city just beyond its gates. I loved that about it. The chaos of the city was always there, just out of reach, but here on campus, everything felt more manageable, more controlled.

By the time I looked up from my work, an hour had passed, and I had barely made a dent in the problem set. My phone buzzed with a message from Claire, my roommate, asking if I wanted to grab lunch later. I typed a quick response, declining but promising I'd catch up with her tomorrow. Right now, I needed to stay focused.

Physics was like that—it demanded focus, precision. Every mistake in a calculation could send you spiraling in the wrong direction, leading to hours of frustration. But when you got it right, when all the numbers clicked into place, there was a kind of satisfaction that was hard to describe. It was like unlocking a door to the universe.I stretched my arms above my head and glanced at the clock. My study group was meeting in the library in an hour, and I still hadn't finished the problem I was working on. With a resigned sigh, I stood up and grabbed my jacket, deciding that maybe a change of scenery would help me concentrate.