she took his number and never texted

A bookstore in a small Swedish city, 11 September 2011. A poet, 22, is reading to a room, and a woman is sitting in it. He assumes she came to hear him. She did not.

A month later he is in a café, hungover, and she is at the next table with her best friend, who has a snake tattooed down one arm. They talk about an obscure book and about settlers in the north of Sweden in the 1800s, and she laughs like a hyena. He asks whether they should do something sometime. She says yes. He has lost his phone somewhere in the night before, so he offers his number and she writes it down. She never texts.

What he does with that is the first thing worth knowing about him. For the next eighteen months he does not ask why. He stops to talk every time he runs into her, in the supermarket, at a club, on the street, and works at not looking like a man who stops to talk every time he runs into her. For a while he dates someone else, someone kind. In the winter of 2012 he writes an essay arguing that an Adrienne Rich poem is The Waste Land turned inside out, and she reads it sitting in her shower with the laptop on the floor outside the stall. Her verdict is that he plainly does not know what he is talking about, and that he writes as though his thoughts matter. The second part is what she keeps.

April 2013, walking home, they reach the river that splits the town, his side and her side. She nods toward her block and he follows her up to a room full of books, found objects and half-finished canvases, and there, with every chance to say something charming, he gives a long speech on shame, on the mess his life is in, and on Saint Augustine's Confessions, with a detour through the night he kissed his first girlfriend and had to lie down on a playground slide to recover. They still joke about how unattractive he made himself. She liked it anyway.

In January 1862 a box of orchids from Madagascar reached Charles Darwin at Down House. One of them, Angraecum sesquipedale, kept its nectar at the bottom of a spur a foot long, and Darwin wrote to his friend Hooker in a postscript: "Good Heavens what insect can suck it". His answer was that there had to be a moth with a tongue to match, and that the flower and the moth had made each other, each small change in one pulling a small change out of the other. Nobody had seen such a moth. One was named in 1903, with praedicta, the predicted one, added to its name. Henrik Karlsson borrows the orchid for what happened next, and it is the right picture: two people who each grew into a shape that only fits the other.

Cochabamba bus station, December 2014. Ten weeks of empty hotels on the Peruvian coast and up in the Andes, two weeks from home, eighteen months a couple. He is 23 and assumes a poet's life will carry him to New York. She wants a cheap life somewhere nobody wants to live, so that money can never tell her what to do. He treats the two wants as equations and goes looking for the intersection, and on a napkin from the market in Calama where they ate breakfast he draws a floor plan of his grandparents' house, the one his grandfather built in 1957 with two teenagers he hired, and a scheme for buying it off-market some day. Then he goes to an internet café. There is an email from his mother. The grandparents are selling.

Two months after they first talked about living in it, they signed the papers.

They treated the house as a place to run experiments. The first was the internet. They listed every argument for having it, found none they believed, and went a year without any, then bought a gigabyte of data to check email. Anything he wanted to look up went into a notebook, and twice a week he walked to the library and worked through the list, which is how he came to stand at a public terminal asking himself why he needed to know Justin Bieber's net worth. They talked three or four hours a day, about Tolstoy's school at Yasnaya Polyana, about machine learning, about talking. With the hours left over he taught himself multivariate calculus and computer science and wrote a novel about people who swap bodies when they sleep together. She had trained as a schoolteacher, and spent a year giving herself the education nineteen years of school had not.

Then the part the video was built around. Their routines, where the dish brush lives, who carries the bins to the road on Tuesday night, were the code, and living was running it. Every Sunday they stood in front of a blackboard painted onto the wall of his study and wrote up everything that had gone wrong that week. He calls it the "bug log". The point was to find what needed changing and change it before the next Sunday. He describes it as a ratchet, each year's lapses shorter than the year before.

One entry kept coming back. He wanted three hours of writing before breakfast and kept sleeping through the alarm. The fix, when he found it, was that he was not tired at night, so he gave up coffee. After a few weeks of tweaking he was awake at five, two steps from the bed to the desk, doing mathematics while the sky came up.

love does not undo your character flaws, it just means they can damage one more person

A couple at a blackboard on a Sunday is the least romantic scene in the whole story, and the essay does not dress it up. Read what is on the board, though: the dish brush, the bins on a Tuesday, an alarm nobody is getting up for, one man's coffee. Every Sunday, what went wrong. Never who.

The painting: Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), National Gallery, London. Public domain.

The story: after Henrik Karlsson, "Looking for Alice" (17 January 2023) and "Relationships are coevolutionary loops" (31 October 2023), both on Escaping Flatland. Retold here; the originals are linked below.

Sources