Manufactured romance

A man and a woman are in the backseat of his car. They finished dinner and drove for a while before pulling over in the parking lot of a city park. They start kissing and she stops him.

"This feels really trashy," she says. She wants romance, she tells him. 

"You want romance? Use your imagination."

She rebuffs him.

He doubles down. "I'm serious. Imagine you're my mistress. We're in a lonely mansion, lit only by the moon and the occasional flash of lightning," he takes a break from the story to begin to pull her shoulder strap down. "We can't see one another, only feel light touches. You are the object of my affection. I desire only to have you, even though we can't. That's us right now, only a different setting," and he smiles at her.

She frowns. "That's not funny, I'm being serious." 

"So am I," he says. 

"Why can't this be romantic? Because we're in a car? Because we're not in a bed? I live with my parents, I can't bring you home." 

She feels bad. Or rather, she doesn't know how to feel. She begins to acquiese. 

He sits up and pulls back from the story.

"Wait. Don't undress. How about this?"

He launches into another diatribe "You're a hardworking, breadwinning woman. Head of your field. You come home after a long day and sit in your favorite chair. I stroll up, place a cup of tea on the side table, drop your book into your lap. You sigh as I begin rubbing your shoulders, your neck. Then I quickly pivot to the foot rest. You put your feet in my lap. Without a word I take off your shoes and rub them until your head goes back in relaxation. This romance intensifies as I move up your leg, massaging you into ecstasy" he's enacting the gestures of his story on her body the whole time.

Spastically, he switches topics.

"We can be that. We can be anything. I am striving for your affection. Wooing you. I am a poet. Your eyes pierce me. Daggerish. No, much kinder, full of life. The way the sunlight pierces our atmosphere to warm us. The way an elegant swan pierces the surface of a lake to wash itself. Your face a vision of beauty. Not biblical, not angelic. Real, magnificent. As if sculpted by a man tasked with creating beauty itself."

He sits back. "Romance isn't rose petals leading to the bed, or candles lit around the tub, or soft music playing, or kissing under the moon. Romance is ever present when we're together because it's present in me. I am romance."

This worked and the woman he was with lunged into their sexual activities with delight.

A few days later a friend of his was asking how his date went. 

"Great dude she let me fuck. I'm not really interested in a relationship though, so I had to ghost her."

Men are pigs, don't fall for it.

Do Tell

 Lately a few people have been pointing out my mannerisms to me and I love it. I guess I should be astonished, or afraid even, that I don't know myself that well, but I'm not really paying attention. My mind wanders easily, and my imagination takes over. That sounds like something someone would say about a five year old. I don't mind. If I can be as carefree as a child, I've attained a victory, however subconscious it is. 

Speaking of my subconscious, there must be a lot going on in there. Wherever it is. Or whatever. Not too sure. Either way, the idea I have of myself and the idea other people have of me don't seem to line up. I'm often lost in thought, and in doing so I scrunch up my face like I'm trying to strengthen my forehead muscles. I'm just as often lost in song, and I routinely get caught singing some eclectic tune that has been jailed in my skull, or some song I made up entirely while drifting off. When I catch myself I imagine someone else seeing me. How strange he is, they must think, to be staring so decidedly at nothing at all. How angry he is, they must think, glaring at everyone around him.

That line of thought recently got turned on its head due to the state of the world, now that we are all wearing masks. Walking into the break room at work I was greeted by a coworker who told me they don't like me wearing a mask. They can't see my smile. I was taken aback. I flat out asked what they meant. They told me that I was always smiling, and they found it pleasant, and now the mask hides it.

My shock was immeasurable. I don't remember smiling. Perhaps they were wrong. But what kind of person would lie about something like that?  How kind of them to say such a thing to me at all.  A wonderful moment, indeed.  It changed how I saw myself. I was so happy to be a person that they saw was smiling all the time.  I have never cared about wearing a mask for health reasons, but suddenly I wanted to never wear one again.

Once I started to have my mannerisms pointed out to me I started to notice some myself. Looking at old pictures and sometimes videos, I would pick out my own mannerisms. A video of me watching my dog spotlights how I hold my hands and my arms when I am stationary.  I fiddle with my hands when they are by my sides.  My hands reach up and rest themselves on my neck, in the crook of my elbow.  It felt almost foreign to be watching myself from an analytical point of view. It also made me feel like these involuntary actions were my personality manifesting itself through my body.  Where many people may feel strong-armed by the idea of fate, destiny, of being a vessel, I was reinvigorated by my own quirks, steadfast in my love for myself. What an odd creature I am.  

This was many years ago I began to write this story.  Back when I worked in a job with a break room and having to wear a mask.  In a stroke of coincidence, I have had another feature of mine communicated to me quite recently.  At a restaurant, the people across from me told me I had nice eyes.  How lucky for me.  Something I have no control over, something I use exclusively for perceiving my world, people like to look at.  When I was younger, and susceptible to negative influence, my eyes were a point of derision. Quite large and alien, back then.  My love for myself grows once again with the help of the people around me. They took a moment to say a nice thing, and now I feel it in my head and in my heart.  

Can you see the disconnect?  I had wondered how I looked to the people around me.  Feeling strange as a being.  My habits look foreign, quizzical, deviating, unfamiliar. Perhaps even contentious, bothersome.  My mind told me this before any person did.  Still I took pleasure in being the way I am, in spite of the potential perception.  Concrete evidence was then presented and now I can take pleasure in the way I am, but from a different place, a better place, a more wholesome place.  Does the source of my inspiration make a difference? Very much so.  Living for spite, with spite, in a constant state of animosity with suspicion will take you down a path of acrimony.  Perhaps not full of malice, but

inspired by a rancorous gusto.  There is a peace that washes over you when your internal accusations are trimmed up.  A turbulence that I did actively notice was pacified.  How harmonious life can be when you are not fighting false diffidence.  A boon of arrogance washed over me due to not a kind word, but an honest one.  The nullification of doubt, of uncertainty.  Mental strife, inner turmoil: a revealing affirmation, much like a lifting fog.  

I am reminded of my forgetfulness often.  Nothing of major import, but noticeable to myself.  Being told my mannerisms lingers eternal, an adamant yet unconscious reminder that I wage no war, I need not live in the shadow of hostility.  My courage is impetuous, my certainty is impregnable, my style is convivial.  Thank you for letting me know.

The kinds of relativity that interests me

 There are many things that qualify for the subject: I don't quite understand and nobody can explain it to me.  I often wonder why Giants in fiction move at such a slow rate.  First we must dissect the relativity of speed.  Ants, humans, and elephants all exist, and they are each fast in their own regards, yet the difference in scale changes how we understand that.  Elephants are much larger than humans, and have been clocked running faster than most, at up to 25 miles per hour.  How many miles per hour can an ant move?  When I asked myself that was when I realized, at least colloquially, that we measure speed not in parameters of speed itself, but of how quickly a distance is traveled.  If an ant were scaled up to be similar to a human, would it be faster, similar, or slower than ourselves?  I do not have the faintest clue of how to figure that out.  When the question of fictional Giants is introduced, it becomes even more difficult.  We see Godzilla trudge through Tokyo, the size of a skyscraper.  Menacing, imposing, but also able to step several blocks at a time due to his size alone.  I have to imagine his size alone allows him to travel at least 50 miles an hour at a walking pace.  Is he faster than humans or just bigger?

Either way, my initial query is about their motor function.  In depictions of the Titans from Greek mythology in popular culture that I have seen, they are positively enormous.  Yet they will throw a punch or try to stomp on someone, and it is an unbearably slow, telegraphed, and laborious process.  They will lift their foot and groan like a zombie, as humans underfoot simply run away before they can get stepped on.   More questions spring up. Loads and loads of questions that either nobody cares to explain or doesn't know.  Why would it not be more comparable to myself stepping on an ant?  If I went to step on an ant, I wouldn't raise my knee to my chest and then slowly drop my foot over the course of an entire minute.  I'd riverdance upon the ant with gusto and be on with it.  Why, then, does every iteration of Giants have them be slow, lumbering buffoons when they would be enormous, destructive, terrors? Is it all bad writing, bad storytelling? A horrid understanding of their mechanics? Deliberate misdirection or depictions made unscientifically? 

Something I have speculated, quietly in my own head where nobody can make fun of me, is that time is also relative to size.  By that I mean that maybe an ant sees us like we depict fictional Giants.  Far-fetched, I know, as there is no real way to test or understand this, and the basis for the idea comes from fiction.  Nevertheless, it is interesting to think about, and fake-reason about, as far as speed and size go.  Many problems arise from that.  I am still able to stomp the ant.  If they experience time differently, and I look like I am moving slow to them, then there is a disconnect between our different time dilations.  I look slow and pedestrian, but the foot drops nevertheless, crushing them.  So they are not actually moving slower in time, only the appearance of time moves slow. 

Extrapolate this to anything else.  What if the smaller you are, the longer time lasts? What if the larger you are, the quicker it flashes by?  At least in the sense of how time feels.  Well that would mean the universe feels like it could be just days old, at least to itself.  Ants feel like they've been around longer than time has, in their own ant minds.  This only brings more questions, namely the concept of "feeling" itself, and the very concept of relativity.  Both of these being human created concepts.  The universe doesnt feel anything.  So if there is an unfeeling entity also experiencing time, it cannot interpret it differently.  A mountain doesn't feel like humans are slow moving and itself is quick, for it is un-emotive, un-alive (in the interest of discussion this will not be discussed currently), and uncaring.  It simply is a mountain, existing throughout.  The Earth as a planet does not feel as if the mountains on it are changing faster than the humans.  There is a clear timeline of those events. 

I'd like to backpedal to the nature of Giants in the first place.  The scale we created is still rather small.  Imagine a Giant so big, that it floats in space and the Earth seems like a soccer ball to it.  Would it not be able to dribble us like Ronaldo and kick us into the sun?  Humans cannot comprehend or imagine this type of speed.  If it were ever depicted in fiction, each dribble would last for hours as we slowly drifted across space and the foot connected again for another bounce.  This depiction constrains our thoughts and encourages us to think slowly.  Everything is faster than we think, so fast we don't have words or ideas for them.

This disparity that defines relativity itself is also but a question. While scientific studies are not popular culture, I have to imagine there is a formula somewhere that encompasses what I am saying. But maybe there isn't. There are a multitude of factors that go along with size, some probably will remain questions forever. First and foremost, could something that large even exist? Godzilla-esque or larger. Probably not, based on meal consumption alone. It would have to eat a church full of people twice a day to sustain itself. Anything bigger wouldn't be able to live very long. BUT! What if it could? Are there theoretical devices to see how they could move? 

That's too many questions. I already have an answer. This Giant would move quickly, deftly. If it wanted to be deadly we would be at it's mercy. To a Giant, a monstrous, planet-sized space demon, we are smaller than the pesky ants. Poor ants. They are the first thing we think of when we imagine something very small. They are constantly stepped on just for existing where our feet are.  Let's leave them out of this. My theoretical Giant would blast us across the cosmos like a child throwing a bouncy ball as high as it can in the air for fun.  We'd careen through space, dead as fuck, an empty planet, slam-dunked further into the universe. 

I stopped caring about relativity when I realized it doesn't matter. Somewhere along the way I started feeling bad for the ants. I hope the cosmic giant who finds has the same compassion.