My Blurry Girlfriend
by Michael Jaoui
She only had one photo on her profile, and it was blurry. I don't usually go on dates with people who hide their face, online dating being what it is. It's not that I was afraid she'd be unsightly--it's that she was hiding something, and I don't like mysteries. But I took a chance and met her for coffee.
When I got to the cafe, I saw her sitting there with a cup of coffee jittering in her hand. It shook like it was her tenth cup of the day. And she was still blurry. I sat down and made small talk. I rubbed my eyes. I blinked. I wondered if I was going blind.
"You're rubbing your eyes because?" she said, a little shyly, I think, it was hard to tell with all the motion blur.
"Rubbing my eyes? No, I'm not. Or I am, but I'm only tired."
"It's because I'm blurry," she said.
"Are you? Blurry? I hadn't noticed a thing," I said.
"It's okay. People do it a lot. And I am blurry." And that was that.
Turns out, her mother is some genius physicist and worked on a particle supercollider while she was pregnant with her daughter. As a result, this girl was born in a quantum superposition. I didn't know much about quantum physics at the time, although I've done some reading since, but she told me part of that meant she's never observable in one place exactly or at one velocity exactly. With particles, it just amounts to numbers on a chart. With her, it resulted in a sort of charming uncertainty.
The first date turned into a second and then a third, until we had been dating for a few months.
One night, while we were making love (or right before--I had to position carefully because her indistinct position could cause uncomfortable logistic problems, so to speak), she disappeared in a flash of light. Apparently that can happen to quantum particles. They spontaneously excite into a higher state of energy. Or that's what her mother told me when I tracked her down.
"Don't worry," she said, as she swilled a mouthful of scotch. "She'll pop up again at one point or another. The first law of thermodynamics, you know--matter is never created or destroyed, it merely changes form."
