The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that there is an inherent uncertainty, an unbreakable unknowingness, in everything’s position and velocity. No matter how sure you are that you exist in a place, or that you’re moving toward where you want to be, uncertainty persists, and will always exist.
Uncertainty was my friend, first. I would linger by the door so we could walk to the parking lot together. I invited him over to my apartment for Bachelor night, to drink wine with me and my roommates. It was easy to be friends with uncertainty, and perhaps in the world I had constructed of tight scheduling and carefully-planned moments, this was good for me at the time. Perhaps not. But our friendship accelerated quickly and within weeks we were together more often than we were not.
There was uncertainty in our position, next. He uncertainly had a wife—but would shake his head and smile and wonder aloud at how I could be so special, so bright and so attentive. Uncertainty leaned only three inches, maybe two, from my face whenever we spoke. He attempted to hide his smirk when he glimpsed his name in my diary, surrounded by stress-induced red pen marks and torn edges. Uncertainty ultimately showed his smooth, spitting face when he pushed his dark curls behind his ears, leaned in, and said to me, I get jealous when you talk about other boys. Uncertainty was small, smaller than all the small numbers I could have thought of, but this only made him harder to find, hiding among the anonymous faces in the lecture hall or within the thin, slimy pages of my undecipherable textbooks. When I tried to live without uncertainty, he bound my chest and painted smoke signals in the sky above my bus stop, threatening to cut himself unless I paid him attention.
Now, uncertainty has gravitated toward our movement. He is as uncertain as I about where to tread next, about where a landmine will uncertainly be hiding just underneath the surface of the linoleum hallways. I walk over tiles, over brick, over sidewalk pavement and tense at the uncertain thought of seeing his dark curls peek around corners. Uncertainty persists.
In my dreams, I run and I run and I run away from him—I run until I crash into Dr. Werner Heisenberg, himself, and I stumble to the ground. My wrinkled friend Werner raises one eyebrow, as if scolding me for daring believe that I could be the sole exception from his omnipotent principle. Heisenberg pulls me off the floor, puts his hands on my shoulders, and spins me around to face the looming uncertainty, himself.