Falling (6): The Geometry of Broken Hearts
- TwoJays MyEye
- Feb 24
- 18 min read
Updated: Apr 9
In the moment between 3:47 and 3:48 AM, time itself grows uncertain of its direction. Maya's apprentice mark began to glow. The silver light caught the edges of reality like moonlight on broken glass, creating patterns that weren’t have been possible in Euclidean space. Above her, points of light that marked moments of love—both found and lost—traced complex constellations in the Library's eternal twilight. Each point pulsed with its own rhythm, like hearts beating in time to an inaudible cosmic melody that might have been Rachmaninov, or might have been the sound the universe made before it learned to speak.
"There's a pattern forming," Maya said, tracing lines between floating motes of light that hung in the air above the Librarian's desk. Each point represented a moment where love had changed direction: Lester wrapping Ruby's wine glass, Ruby sketching bridges in Milan, Frankie pausing before a shop window that showed her a different version of herself, Johnny writing poems he would never send.
The Librarian looked up from a book whose pages were made of mirror fragments. "What do you see?"
"It's like... constellation work, but with hearts instead of stars." Maya connected another set of points, creating a complex geometric shape that sparkled in the Library's eternal twilight. "See how Lester's path keeps intersecting with his past? But each intersection is at a different angle now."
"Good." The Librarian stood, her form momentarily fragmenting into countless versions of herself before resolving back into one. "And what does that tell you about the nature of healing?"
Before Maya could answer, one of the books on the upper shelves began to sing. Not with words, but with the kind of melody that forms when rain hits windows in a certain way. The Librarian gestured, and the book floated down to them, its pages ruffling in a wind that didn't exist.
"Ah," she said, catching the volume. "Frankie's story is ready to deepen. Observe."
The air around them shimmered, and suddenly they were standing in a quiet corner of Melbourne's State Library. Frankie sat at a desk surrounded by old maps, her fingers tracing the borders of lost countries. She had come looking for something specific – a map of Venice from 1800 – but found herself instead drawn to the margins, where cartographers had sketched sea monsters and impossible creatures.
"Notice how she keeps returning to the blank spaces," the Librarian murmured. "The places marked 'here be dragons.'"
Maya nodded, watching as Frankie's hand hovered over a particularly elaborate illustration. "She's looking for something that isn't on any map."
"Aren't they all?" The Librarian smiled, and for a moment the library around them flickered, showing glimpses of other libraries in other times – Alexandria before it burned, Baghdad's House of Wisdom, and countless others lost to time and change. "But watch what happens when we adjust the light just so..."
She raised her hand, and the afternoon sun slanting through the windows shifted slightly. One beam caught the edge of Frankie's map at a precise angle, illuminating previously invisible text in the margin. Words written in ancient ink revealed themselves: "The heart has its own cartography."
Frankie blinked, wondering if she had imagined it. She leaned closer, but the words seemed to fade even as she tried to read them. Still, they left an impression, like the afterimage of lightning behind closed eyes.
Meanwhile, in Milan, Ruby was having coffee with Mark, though neither the Librarian nor Maya bothered to witness this directly. Some scenes were better left unobserved, leaving their details to form naturally in the margins of other stories.
The Hollow Archives
Maya's apprentice mark still glowed as she watched reality hold its breath, but something caught her peripheral vision—a darkness seeping between the shelves. "There's something else here," she whispered, turning away from the Librarian's desk. "Something... empty."
The Librarian's form shifted, becoming more shadow than light. "Ah," she said, her voice carrying the weight of centuries of witnessed denial. "You've noticed the Hollow Archives."
Beyond the warmth of the Librarian's lamp, past the shelves of bleeding ink and pulsing possibility, the library stretched into darkness. Here, the books didn't glow or weep—they absorbed light, their black bindings unmarked, their pages filled with nothing but shallow scratches where deep words should have been.
"These are the anti-stories," the Librarian explained, leading Maya deeper into the shadows. "The tales of those who never learned to love because they never saw it demonstrated. Watch."
She waved her hand, and the air above them rippled into vision: Ruby's childhood home, where her mother flitted from a man, abusive, the relationship as substantial as morning mist, but dangerous. Where her father practiced the art of absence until it became his only true skill. Where aunts and uncles played at affection but fled the moment it threatened to become real.
"This is where Ruby learned to run," the Librarian said, her voice heavy with knowledge. "Look how the pattern repeats."
The vision shifted, showing dozens of interconnected scenes: Ruby's aunt leaving three different marriages before they could touch her core, her cousin collecting lovers like butterflies—admiring their beauty but pinning them in place until they stopped moving, her grandmother teaching them all that love was a pretty fiction, something that happened in books but never in reality.
"The Hollow Archives grow," Maya observed, watching as new black books materialized on the shadowy shelves. "But how?"
"Through practiced denial," the Librarian replied. She pulled one of the black volumes free, its cover seeming to drink in even the memory of light. "Every time someone chooses the shallow over the deep, every time they mistake physical sensation for emotional connection, every time they run from the first hint of real feeling—" She opened the book, revealing pages that seemed to be made of void. "They write their names here, in The Book of Unlearned Love."
Maya peered closer at the dark pages. In the emptiness, she could see flickers of scenes: beautiful people in beautiful rooms, engaging in beautiful acts that meant nothing at all. Each encounter was perfect on the surface but hollow underneath, like magnificent shells that housed no living thing.
"Ruby's family fills volumes here," the Librarian continued, running her finger along a shelf of particularly light-hungry books. "Generations of people who taught each other that love wasn't real, that connection was dangerous, that the only safe path was the shallow one."
"Is this why Ruby left Lester?" Maya asked, her apprentice mark dulling in the presence of so much practiced emptiness.
"Partly," the Librarian answered, returning the black book to its shelf. "She comes from a long line of runners, of people who built their lives around avoiding the real. They filled their worlds with movement to hide the fact that they never went anywhere at all."
Above them, the scenes continued to play: beautiful people living beautiful lives that touched nothing and changed nothing. They chased pleasure without joy, connection without depth, stories without meaning.
"But Ruby's book isn't here," Maya realized, looking around at the shadow archives.
"No," the Librarian smiled, and for a moment her form brightened. "Her story bleeds. It weeps. It stains the pages and refuses to dry. That's how we know there's hope." She gestured back toward her desk, where Lester's book still glowed with its faint blue light. "She learned their lessons about running, yes. But Lester showed her real love her and so she never quite learned how to keep her heart hollow."
"Even the hollow can learn to be whole," the Librarian said, noting Maya's observation. "Though it takes tremendous courage to begin filling an emptiness you've spent generations cultivating."
Back at the desk, the Librarian lifted Lester's book again. "This is why his pain matters," she explained. "This is why we let him hurt. Because the alternative—" she gestured back toward the darkness, "—is so much worse."
Maya understood now why the Librarian had shown her the shadows. In the darkness of the Hollow Archives, she had seen what Ruby was running from: not just Lester, but the possibility of being real in a family that had perfected the art of being empty.
"And Frankie and Johnny?" Maya asked, thinking of their books glowing on distant shelves.
"Their stories will never be hollow," the Librarian said, returning to her desk. "Damaged, yes. Complicated, certainly. But always real." She picked up her never-moving quill. "Now, shall we see what happens when authentic hearts learn to beat in time?"
The air above her desk shimmered with possibility, and somewhere in Melbourne, two separate paths began to curve toward an intersection that would change everything.
The Geometry of Heartbreak
"There's a geometry to heartbreak," the Librarian said, her form shifting like equations rewriting themselves in a language that existed before numbers. As she moved, she left traces in the air—geometric patterns about love and loss that glowed briefly before dissolving into memories no one had yet experienced. "Each person's pain creates its own geometric signature, written in quantum entanglement, and as unique as the way they take their coffee, or the precise angle at which they avoid their reflection in windows after midnight."
They descended through the floor as if through water made of memory, entering a space where the physics of love worked in reverse. Here, books didn't glow or bleed—they consumed light, their black bindings unmarked except for names that seemed to shift and squirm when looked at directly, like the way truth moves just out of sight when you try to examine it too closely.
"Each dark volume has its own specific gravity," the Librarian explained, pulling a book that seemed to drink starlight. "Some pull harder than others. Watch."
She opened the book labeled "Dan - Father of Running," and the darkness poured out like oil, forming a pool at their feet. In its reflection, they saw a man whose violence was as casual as breathing. Dan, Ruby’s father, moved through the world like a storm looking for windows to break, his hands always clenched as if holding back lightning.
"Watch," the Librarian commanded, pulling a volume that appeared to be made of solidified shadow. "This is Dan's geometry." The book opened, and darkness poured out, forming complex fractals of violence and fear, a volume that appeared to be made of solidified shadow. They watched as Dan moved through his life leaving broken patterns in his wake. His anger had its own mathematical precision—each burst calculated to cause maximum damage while maintaining plausible deniability.
"Dan taught Ruby that love and fear were the same thing," the Librarian said, her voice carrying echoes of broken glass and midnight screams. "But watch how the pattern complexifies."
"Watch," the Librarian commanded, pulling a volume that appeared to be made of solidified shadow. "This is Dan's geometry."
The book opened, darkness poured out, they watched again, as the complex fractal entanglements of violence and fear were formed. They watched again seeing Dan’s life leaving broken patterns in his wake.
"He learned to hit where bruises wouldn't show," Maya observed, watching the dark patterns repeat and evolve. "But the real damage was in the geometry of fear he created."
"Yes," the Librarian agreed. "See how his patterns intersect with these?" She drew out another book, this one humming with the hollow light of Ruby’s mother.. "Lois's prayers created their own kind of mathematics."
The dark pool rippled, and another book floated down from the shadows - "Lois - Mother of Empty Prayers." Its pages opened to show a woman clutching a rosary like a weapon, her prayers sharp enough to cut but never deep enough to heal.
Before he died, Maya had learned to manifest in Dan's world as the weight that made his hand tremble when he lifted his glass, as the shadow that showed him, just for an instant, the geometry of damage he had created. She became the echo of his own voice coming back to him in empty rooms, carrying questions he'd spent a lifetime avoiding.
"And here," the Librarian said, drawing out another volume that hummed with hollow light, "is Lois's equation." The pages opened to reveal Ruby's mother's life mapped in rosary beads and ritual repetitions. Each prayer was a perfect circle that never connected to anything real, creating infinite loops of practiced piety that served as barriers against genuine feeling.
They manifested in Lois's church, becoming the way candlelight flickered across her rosary beads. Each bead caught the light differently, showing her brief glimpses of the emptiness in her prayers, though she quickly looked away.
With her, Maya became the echo of hymns, carrying notes that almost spoke truth before fading into the kind of silence that fills confessionals after dark.
"Lois found God in all the wrong places," Maya observed, watching scenes of performative piety play out in the darkness. "She used religion like a shield against real feeling."
"Yes," the Librarian agreed. "She prayed for salvation but never for understanding. Watch how her hollowness spreads."
"Each person's emotional mathematics is unique," the Librarian explained, drawing complex patterns in the air. "Dan's violence follows the Fibonacci sequence—each outbreak building on the sum of previous ones. See how the spiral tightens?" She traced the dark pattern that emanated from his book. "His rage creates a perfect golden ratio of fear to control."
Maya watched as Dan's equations played out: perfectly timed explosions of anger followed by precisely calculated periods of calm. "He turned abuse into arithmetic," she observed.
"Yes, and Lois's prayers respond with their own mathematics." The Librarian drew another pattern, this one composed of interlocking circles. "She creates perfect spiritual mandalas that serve as force fields against genuine feeling. Each rosary bead is a point in a geometric proof that love is impossible."
The patterns combined in the air, showing how Dan's spirals of violence and Lois's circles of denial created a complex three-dimensional cage. "This is the mathematical space where Ruby learned to exist," the Librarian said. "But look what happens when we add the other variables."
"Their combined equations created this," the Librarian continued, drawing out a third book that seemed to fight against its own existence. Its pages showed Ruby as a child, learning to calculate escape routes, to measure the distance between her father's moods, to count the beads of her mother's endless rosaries.
Above them, in the brighter part of the Library, Lester's book still glowed with its steady blue light. The contrast made the darkness here seem deeper.
”There’s the geometric space where Ruby learned," the Librarian said, reaching into the darkness for another volume "and look what happens when we add her brother's variables."
"Look at how the patterns multiply," the Librarian said, gesturing to an entire section of shadow-books. Maya watched as Ruby's brother Mark's volume emerged—its pages filled with the small, mean mathematics of petty theft and minor betrayals. Unlike Dan's calculated violence or Lois's circular prayers, Mark's geometry was chaotic, each pattern broken before it could complete itself. "He stole things to feel something," the Librarian noted, "but never kept them long enough to matter."
Mark's equations—those jagged lines of petty theft creating unstable polygons of temporary satisfaction. His patterns never resolved, each one breaking before it could complete itself, like promises made without the intention of keeping them. They found him in a pawn shop, where they manifested as reflections in the glass cases. The Librarian became the way light caught stolen jewelry, showing him the hollow geometry of his choices. Here, Maya learned to be the weight of watches that kept imperfect time, each one marking moments he couldn't quite steal back.
"Unlike the Other Mark," the Librarian added, summoning a book bound in perfectly smooth leather that somehow contained no depth at all. "His mathematics is all about surface—perfect planes with no depth, precise calculations of advantage disguised as affection." They watched him in Melbourne, negotiating furniture deals with practiced charm that formed beautiful but empty patterns in the air.
Besides Mark's book floated one labeled "Tracey - Collector of Temporary Loves." Its pages showed a woman who had four children by four different men, each birth a desperate attempt to create connection through creation. Only Bobby's, Maddy’s father had offered anything resembling love, and even that had been brief - a candle flame in a lifetime of darkness.
Tracey's geometry emerged as four distinct spirals, each representing a child, each reaching for but never quite achieving a stable orbit. "Only Bobby introduced a new variable," the Librarian noted, pointing to a brief golden sequence in one spiral. "A moment of real love that disrupted her hollow equations." They manifested in her kitchen as steam rising from coffee, as morning light catching family photos that held shadows of what might have been.
The Librarian waved her hand, and 386 distinct patterns filled the air—Ruby's cousins in New Zealand, each one a variation on the family's theme of emotional avoidance. "Their combined mathematics creates a kind of anti-love field," she explained. "A proof against genuine feeling that spans generations."
“The hollow archives run deeper here," the Librarian said, waving her hand. The pool of darkness expanded, and suddenly they were surrounded by books - 386 volumes, each representing one of Ruby's first cousins in New Zealand. The books arranged themselves in a vast family tree, each branch weighed down with generations of practiced emptiness.
But Jonathan's patterns stood out—his equations still used the family's basic variables but solved for different answers. In his Brooklyn apartment, they found him writing to Ruby, becoming the cursor's blink on his screen, drawing his attention to certain words. Maya shaped the city sounds floating through his window into rhythms that almost spoke truth.
"Look how they echo each other," Maya whispered, watching as similar scenes played out across different lives. Men who left, women who never learned to stay, children who grew up thinking love was just another word for absence.
"Not all of them," the Librarian corrected, pointing to a book that seemed less dark than the others. "Jonathan, in New York - see how his pages hold a different quality of shadow?"
The book in question floated down to them. Unlike the others, its darkness wasn't absolute. Thin threads of light ran through its pages like veins of gold in black rock.
"He's helping Ruby now," Maya realized, watching scenes unfold: Jonathan in his Brooklyn apartment, taking late-night calls from his cousin, offering not hollow comfort but real questions. "He's helping her transform, even though he hasn't found love himself."
"He's learning to question the family legacy," the Librarian agreed. "Watch how his influence ripples."
The pool of darkness shifted again, showing them scenes from across time and space: Jonathan teaching Ruby to challenge the family's empty patterns, to question why they all ran, to wonder if there might be another way to live.
"But the weight of history is heavy," the Librarian continued, gesturing to the vast collection of dark books. "Three hundred and eighty-six first cousins, most of them carrying forward the family tradition of hollow hearts. Each one adding their own volume to these archives."
Maya watched as scenes played out across the dark pool: countless family gatherings where love was mentioned but never demonstrated, weddings that celebrated union without connection, births that added to the family tree without deepening its roots.
"They created their own reality," the Librarian observed, her form shifting like smoke in shadow. "A world where love was always elsewhere, always impossible, always something that happened to other people. They filled their lives with movement - marriages, divorces, relocations, reinventions - but never stillness. Never depth."
"Is this why Ruby's running feels different?" Maya asked, noting how her story book still bled while her family's books consumed light.
"Yes," the Librarian smiled, though the expression held centuries of witnessed pain. "She runs like they taught her, but she bleeds like someone who knows there's something more. That's what makes her dangerous to them. That's why they're trying so hard to help her stay hollow."
"This is where Ruby's transformation becomes fascinating," the Librarian said, pulling forth a book that seemed to exist in multiple states simultaneously. "Like Addie LaRue, she's learning to exist in mathematical impossibility—to be both hollow and whole, empty and full, running and staying, all at once."
The dark pool rippled one final time, showing them Ruby in Milan, surrounded by messages from her hollow family. Each text, each email encouraged her to keep running, to stay shallow, to avoid the pain of real feeling. But beneath their words, barely visible in the darkness, ran a thin thread of Lester's blue light - a reminder that somewhere, somehow, love had touched her deeply enough to leave a mark.
RUBY
In the Milan café, the Librarian manifested as the taste of coffee that reminded her of Melbourne mornings with Lester. Maya became the way sunlight caught her rings, still worn but on a different finger now, showing her how patterns could change without breaking.
Lester's blue light created its own mathematics—steady, recursive functions of loyalty and understanding that intersected with Ruby's shifting geometries in unexpected ways. Where his light touched her patterns, new forms emerged: spirals that turned back on themselves, circles that broke open into infinite lines, fractals that suggested entirely new emotional dimensions.
Frankie and Johnny
In a distant corner of the Library, far from the Hollow Archives and Lester's steady blue light, two books sat on separate shelves. Their spines had begun to glow with their own distinct mathematics, creating patterns that somehow felt both simpler and more honest than the complex geometries of Ruby's family.
"These are different," Maya observed. "Their equations don't carry the weight of generations."
"No," the Librarian agreed. "Frankie and Johnny are writing their own theorems, though they don't know it yet. Watch how their patterns move."
Frankie's book emanated concentric squares of possibility, each one precise but incomplete, as if waiting for some unknown variable to complete the equation. They found her in a bookstore where the Librarian manifested as the way evening light caught certain titles: "The Mathematics of Chance," "Love's Quantum Theory," "The Geometry of Fate." Maya became the sound of pages turning, each rustle carrying echoes of stories not yet written.
Three shelves away, Johnny's book pulsed with gentle spirals that somehow echoed Frankie's squares without touching them. In his late-night diner, they became the steam rising from his coffee, forming shapes that almost looked like answers to questions he hadn't thought to ask. His patterns moved like music written in a key that hadn't been invented yet.
"Their geometries are developing independently," Maya noted, watching the patterns ripple through reality. "But look—" She pointed to where one of Johnny's spirals and one of Frankie's squares briefly aligned, creating a moment of perfect mathematical harmony before diverging again.
"Yes," the Librarian smiled. "And notice something else." She gestured to where their patterns crossed paths with a faint trace of Lester's blue light, and an even fainter echo of Ruby's impossible geometries. "All love stories are connected, even when they seem to occupy different universes entirely."
They manifested in a café where Frankie sat reading, becoming the click of cups against saucers that almost spelled out possibilities. Down the street, though neither of them knew it, Johnny walked past the same café every morning, his path creating a spiral that would gradually draw him closer to that particular door.
Back in the Library proper, Maya noticed how all the patterns—Lester's steady light, Ruby's evolving geometries, her family's hollow mathematics, Jonathan's bridge equations, and Frankie and Johnny's separate but resonant patterns—created a larger, more complex equation. Each story remained distinct, yet together they proved something profound about the nature of love itself.
"Every heart writes its own story," the Librarian said, her form becoming like the space between chapters in an infinite book, "but sometimes, in the margins, they leave notes for each other."
As they returned to the Librarian's desk, Maya saw something she hadn't noticed before. In the spaces between all these patterns, new forms were beginning to emerge—geometries that hadn't existed before, mathematics that hadn't yet been invented. They sparkled like possibilities, or like the way stars look just before you learn their names.
"What are those?" she asked, watching the new patterns shimmer and dance.
The Librarian smiled, her form momentarily becoming like the pause between heartbeats, between decisions, between the infinite possibilities of love lost and found. "Those, my dear apprentice, are tomorrow's theorems writing themselves in today's light."
She lifted her never-moving quill, which caught the light in ways that suggested it existed in more dimensions than space typically allowed. "Now," she said, her voice carrying the weight of all stories ever written and yet to be written, "watch carefully. This is how we help rewrite the world without leaving visible marks on the page."
Above them, all the patterns continued their intricate dance: four separate proofs approaching different kinds of truth, connected only by the faintest threads of mathematical possibility, each one illuminating some small corner of love's vast and endless theorem.
Maya leaned forward, her apprentice mark glowing as she learned to translate herself into the spaces between moments. In Melbourne, Lester felt a sudden peace he couldn't explain. In Milan, Ruby noticed how shadows and light played together to create patterns that almost made sense. And in their separate corners of the city, Frankie and Johnny each felt the air change in a way that seemed significant, though neither could have said why.
As the Library's eternal twilight shifted toward a dawn that might or might not come, new books began to write themselves on previously empty shelves, their pages filled with equations that had never been solved, theorems that had never been proved, and love stories that had not yet learned they were love stories.
The Librarian smiled, knowing that somewhere in those unwritten pages lay the answers to questions that hadn't yet been asked, in cconnections that hadn't yet been dreamed.
Intersection
"Should we check on Lester?" Maya asked, her apprentice mark tingling with unspent possibility.
The Librarian shook her head. "He's in what I call a chrysalis moment. Too much observation can prevent the necessary unraveling." She turned to a new page in the mirror-book, and its surface showed brief flashes: Lester at his desk, surrounded by photographs he wasn't ready to pack yet; Lester in the garden, pruning roses that Ruby had planted; Lester writing in a journal that had somehow appeared on his doorstep one morning (though Maya suspected she knew how it had gotten there).
"But Johnny..." The Librarian's voice trailed off as she turned her attention to another book, this one bound in night-colored leather that seemed to absorb light. "Johnny is approaching an inflection point. Look."
The scene shifted again, and they stood unseen in a late-night diner where Johnny sat writing in a notebook. His coffee had gone cold, but he hadn't noticed, too absorbed in the words flowing from his pen. On the page, he was mapping his own heart's geography, though he didn't know that's what he was doing.
"He thinks he's writing about the city," Maya observed, reading over his shoulder, "but he's really writing about the spaces between people."
"The best ones always do," the Librarian agreed.
She reached out and adjusted the angle of the diner's fluorescent light, letting it cast Johnny's shadow in a way that made it look like wings were unfolding from his shoulders. "They write about one thing while revealing another."
Back in the Library, Maya returned to her constellation of light points, adding new connections as the stories evolved. "It's changing shape," she noted, watching as the geometric pattern shifted and reformed.
"Of course it is." The Librarian returned to her desk, where the mirror-book waited. "Love is never a fixed geometry. It's a constant rearrangement of angles and intersections, of paths crossing and diverging." She turned another page, this one reflecting not what was, but what might be. "The trick is knowing which angles to adjust, and when to let them find their own way."
"And Frankie and Johnny? Will their lines intersect?"
The Librarian smiled that enigmatic smile that always made Maya think of stars wheeling across ancient skies. "They already have. They just don't know it yet."
She drew her never-moving quill across a blank page, and somewhere in Melbourne, a door opened that hadn't been there before, leading to a room that would exist only once, for a moment that hadn't arrived.
"Now," the Librarian said, "let me show you how to bend light around a moment without breaking it." She held up a prism that seemed to be made of frozen time. "Sometimes the most important changes happen in the spectrum we can't see."
Maya leaned forward, her apprentice mark gleaming, ready to learn another secret of the heart's impossible geometry.
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