The Schrödinger Future
For Stephanie Martinez, the bravest woman I’ve ever met. You will get through this.
“Once, never, there was a Sophia and she was for never, forever”
— From Kazimir Sierra’s poem “Once, Never or Wildflower”
It’s the second day of 2018’s February. Twenty-three-year-old college boy Kazimir Sierra is going on a date with a girl he hopes to see again on the fourteenth. And this isn’t just any girl he’s aiming for—this is Sophia De La Cruz he’s talking about here, the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. It’s been two years now since Kazimir met Sophia – back in 2016. Well, really all he ever did was sit several rows behind her in English class, but she had a boyfriend then: Armando Rivera. But Kazimir dared not to forget her name and he instead dared himself on one night, in 2017, to follow her on social media. It was cause for celebration when she followed him back and when Kazimir discovered Armando was no longer her boyfriend. Then, one night in early January 2018, he posted a picture of a small, black and white portrait of Hemingway. What a surprise – she actually responded, saying she liked the way Hemingway wrote. That got them talking of pizza, the city of Austin and music.
She lives now in a city an hour away from Kazimir and teaches at a high school there. Sophia sent him a message towards the end of January: “I remember you said that you love music so I’m going to capitalize on that. What are you doing Friday night?”
He responded: “No plans. My last class is over at 1:30 and I should be home at 2:00.”
It turns out to be an invitation to see some of her students perform in a choir concert. She tells him they can get pepperoni and mushroom pizza together afterwards. The guy would have loved to have replied with “HELL YEAH LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOO”
It’s going to be an hour-long drive. No problem in that. He’s done three hours before for Virginia, his ex-girlfriend that lived in Denton. But this drive, for Sophia, will be the first long drive of 2018. The day before the concert, Kazimir wrote for her a small note:
I wanted to tell you something earlier but I did not have the right words for what I wanted to say. They’re slowly coming to me but, for the sake of this moment, and, to put it simply, what I want to say is that you are gorgeous. There’s more to it than that but I struggle picking better words and that’s because I want the words to be as pretty as you, Sophia.
He took a picture of the note and sent it to her. She read it the next morning.
“What a lovely way to wake up. Thank you, I wish I could read it forever” she said.
“You’re welcome. I’ve got that note on my bookshelf so I can give it to you later if you want.”
“Please do.”
He rushes to add on to the note. After all, he did say more exists to it than that. The words weren’t coming slowly any longer. He wants to impress her, really woo her. He turns it into poem, about three pages long, called “Once, Never, or Wildflower.” He places it in small envelope and brings it with him for the hour-long trip.
It’s dark once he pulls into the parking lot of her apartment. Then he watches her as she walks from around the corner. It’s hard to see at night but Kazimir goes breathless, wordless. It’s hard to even look at her for too long – beautiful, wavy, dark hair, glowing skin, a lovely, delicate, slim figure. A sheer heart attack.
After the concert, a fun concert, they pick up that pepperoni and mushroom pizza and head back to her apartment. With the pizza box firmly in hand, he climbs up a flight of stairs and into her living room. It’s a damn nice apartment, clean and new and stocked up with nice modern furniture. Way prettier than his own house that can get as dirty and chaotic as four college guys can make it. The lights in her apartment give the place a warm, orange glow. Her roommate, Belinda, is out of town, so Kazimir and Sophia are alone. perfect. He can feel all the stars in the skies above Texas start to align in his favor. It’s time to hand her the poem. wait did i leave it in the fucking car Then, like a big white bullet, a cat bursts out of a vacant room – the roommate’s cat.
“Is it a boy or a girl?” he asks.
“It’s really hard to tell the gender of a cat when it’s young. Belinda thought it was a girl and named her Maxine. But, later, she found out that it’s actually a boy. So his name’s Max, now.”
When they sit down on the couches to eat, Kazimir can hear nothing else in the apartment, nothing else in the whole word in fact, except for Sophia and her warm voice.
“You know,” she says, “I don’t remember ever meeting you in class.” Damn, alright, so it’s like that, huh? Then Sophia asks, “Would it be weird to say that I’ve always wanted to sleep with a professor? Like, I’ve always wanted that experience.”
His heart collapses with the force of a dying and disappointing supernova. yo what the FUCK did this girl just say? he thinks to himself. It’s shocking; he can barely manage to restrain an intense urge to rush on back down those stairs out the front door and right back into his little black four door Kia. He forces himself to swallow his panic with the next bite of pizza but his stomach is long gone by now—a black hole must be sitting—no, growing—in his esophagus.
“Tell me, now, about your ex” she asks him.
“Virginia?”
“That’s her name? Virginia? Why would you ever date a girl named Virginia? They’re all the same.” A pause. Every possible response to this question evaporates now from Kazimir’s burning chest like smoke rising from a dying inferno.
how the hell could you say that you dont even know her
Kazimir doesn’t want to retell all about Virginia, but he can’t keep telling Sophia “No.” He feels her pry it out of him. It is straining, having to relive all those intimate moments with Virginia. By the end of his story he’s drained, trembling on the fancy brown leather couch next to her. In the middle of his story, Sophia took off the jacket she had been wearing that night. He could see more of her luscious skin now and, just a couple hours ago, he would have died to have seen it. But now he only wishes that she would quit bringing up her ex-boyfriend: “I’ve only written a few poems, for my ex.” Kazimir choking on his pizza would be his only saving grace from this the awkwardness. In fact, he’d be more comfortable with having a chunk of crust lodge itself in his air canal than to listen to her talk about her ex again. She asks: “So what philosophy classes have you taken?”
that fucker must be a philosophy major if she’s asking that, he thinks.
“Um, well,” he starts to counting off on his fingers on his left hand: “I’ve taken Logic, Ethical Theory, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Literature, and Philosophy of Law—”
“Did you have Armando Rivera in your Philosophy of Law class?” she cuts in, reaching for her phone to show Kazimir a picture of Armando.
“I don’t know, I was never in class. It was an 8 AM.” (He really did skip class a lot)
“Oh, never mind then.” She puts down the phone like a shooter lowering a gun away from a hostage. Kazimir takes of breath in relief — he’d feel yet another star die in his chest if she would have forced Kazimir to see a photo of Armando.
He finally acknowledges the huge ass nice flat screen television in front of them in the living room where they’re eating pizza. “Can that TV play YouTube?” he asks.
“It can, actually.”
“I want to show you Last Dinosaurs, my favorite band.”
“NO!” she shouts.
“What? Why not?” he’s stunned, again.
“That band doesn’t sound like it’s any good!”
Okay – every star in his heart explodes now. Another Big Bang is happening right now in his fucking chest but it’s certain that, this time, a new universe will not rise from this catastrophic explosion – it’s just all death. It is impossible to inhale – he feels his face freeze into a dumb disbelief. No chance in hell now he’s gonna hand her “Once, Never.”
His pizza’s cold now. Kazimir gets up from the couch.
“I need to use your bathroom.”
She points to a door next to the kitchen.
Alone now, in the bathroom, Kazimir stands in front of the mirror. By instinct, he brushes his hair with his hand before he realizes that having perfectly coiffed hair is pointless. He cut his hair two days ago just for Sophia, but he’s not going to try impressing Sophia any longer. He flips the light switch, walks out.
“I’m sorry to ask, but, do you have any bottle water?” he says when he turns toward her.
“For the drive home?”
“Yeah.”
“No, sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’ll just stop at a gas station along the way.”
It’s midnight when she walks him out to his car. Driving his little black four door Kia now, Kazimir breathes in all the wet, windy, cold air around him—all the air in Texas. That’s when he knew he’d lost his future.
Well, it would be better to say he lost a future. Just one. He can’t write while driving so he turns on the microphone on his iPhone and starts to records himself. With his voice, bold now, he says: “You’ve heard of Schrödinger’s cat by now, so I won’t bother with explaining it. What I mean to say is that I’m living the Schrödinger Future, now.”
He shuts the microphone off and drives in silence. No one is around to ask him just what in hell he means by a Schrödinger Future. No one can hear him think ive spent two years thinking of sophia and my whole god damned goal was to move out to austin so that i could have a chance of being her boyfriend but now that i know shes weird as fuck i dont have that future anymore and now the future is in the air now up for grabs it is chaos unpredictable in flux anything is possible now just like schrodingers cat my future is now both dead and alive all at once it is nothing it is everything
The anxiety passes just like the lonely light poles behind him now. Kazimir pulls into the next gas station he spots—a Buc-ee’s. He buys a bottle of water but waits until he’s back in the Kia before he takes his first sip. He raises the bottle and just as it touches his lips he sees the little envelope with the poem he wrote for Sophia sitting on the passenger seat. Kazimir puts the bottle down and picks up the envelope. He centers his thumbs at the top of it and tears it right in half. It’s a satisfying sound, that graceful but quick rip of paper. He opens Spotify on his phone, picking nothing other than Last Dinosaurs to play for the rest of the drive back.
a young writer from the lone star state 