A Love for Squares

I told my cousin over dinner that I am a square. More precisely, I am an 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper. To which he graciously replied that I am not.

It dawned on me, some hours later, that a square can be folded into a paper crane, a boat, a bowl of cereal if you have a vivid imagination...and still be, inherently, a perfect square. 

I realize most of the squares I imagine in everyday life are, indeed, uninteresting. They are functional and neat. They make up the world’s frames, buildings, boxes—wonderful to put things on, inside, and adjacent to. They are flawless shapes of utility, physical or of practical imagination. A square does its job well because it pervades our world invisibly. It has mastery over the act of quiet conforming.

Quiet conforming. Squares and I have more in common than I realized.

I wonder how often squares appear in nature. At 1:00 am, Google says not very often. Natural laws seem to prefer triangular or hexagonal structures. So I stare at an image of a honeycomb. A layer of tiny little bubbles forming hexagons due to surface tension. I read about the "bubble vision" of insects. Staring at hexagons, on a square, in a rectangle—a bright screen suspended between my finger pads. 

It cannot be helped. My attention has curled itself into a hole of bottomless research. Or, perhaps sideless research, in the lateral, unfocused spirals that internet scrolling can offer. As 1 becomes 3, I think about the nonlinearity of time. Feel the curvature of its undulations in my mind, eyes unfocused in a pre-sleep trance. The graceful arc of one fish bone meets with another, the two weaving circles together, into a tangle of lovers. Squares are squares are hexagons are circles, are squares, are hexagons, are circles—dancing at the brink of dreams and dissolution.